CHAPTER 23:
It took a moment for Jallin’s eyes to adjust, but thankfully, sunbeams filtered through the dust moats and found their way to form bright, irregular patches of light on the floor. Counselor Yubrin pulled out his sunstone and slipped it into a necklace, so now he became a walking lantern. Jallin wanted to ask to hold the light so he could go first, but he didn’t think Counselor Yubrin would let him.
The hallways between rooms were little more than dusty trails through a few ornate tables under mirrors. Jallin would explore every room of the place, but Counselor Yubrin and the light were heading for a staircase, lodged somewhere in the back of the house. In the end, they only wandered through a small parlor, with three couches facing each other in an infinite silent conversation. A hearth, pleasantly decorated with little sculptured animals and a centerpiece of flowers so ornately and perfectly duplicated from paper and sticks, Jallin wondered if they turned in the sun. False flowers were an art form, and the art was prized at that. Of all the things Jallin had seen so far worth stealing, he fancied taking just one of the fake flowers off the hearth to sell it somewhere.
But on they went, until they were in another hallway, and here a stairway winded upwards, and another winded downwards. They took the one going down.
“Do you really think he kept all his things downstairs?” Jallin asked. He was reminded of the hospital back at the temple, and more and more he was disliking going down into basements. “Maybe there are some things upstairs worth looking into.”
He pointed upwards. Counselor Yubrin looked at his finger, then his face. Jallin wondered what he sought, and what he saw.
“Steal nothing, Jallin. If you find something, remember where you found it and come get me.” Counselor Yubrin pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket. “We have a writ that says we can be here to take what we are looking for. We’re not allowed to take anything else.”
“So, what should I look for up there?”
Again, scrutiny. The man’s unblinking eyes must have known by now everything there was to know about Jallin.
“Books, tools, perhaps a few articles of clothing. We are not here for jewelry, so do not take any of that. Just bring down what you find that sounds like what I’m looking for. I’ll bring up what I’m looking for.”
Jallin felt a rush of relief as he ran up the stairs. It was like being an equal with someone. Strangely, Counselor Yubrin seemed like he earnestly needed Jallin to help him. And Jallin found himself wanting to help him.
He didn’t know what to expect on the next floor, but he came to a musty, dust-covered door. How long had Mrs. Ruggles been down in that basement?
The door was unlocked. The bedroom behind stood dark and stately. A window, with lace curtains before it, let a little light into the room. He didn’t think this was a master bedroom. It wasn’t on the top floor and it wasn’t big enough. Likely, this was the daughter’s bedroom, or maybe the granddaughters.
The bed still had curtains on it, and one of them had come loose and unfurled so that someone could have been lying in the bed and Jallin wouldn’t be able to tell. Carefully, he peered around the foot of the bed, but found no one. He half expected someone to jump at him, but he didn’t know why.
The curtains were nice enough, and the furnishings were of a fine, polished wood. He found a wardrobe with only a few little dresses hanging and blankets on the bottom. A chest at the foot of the bed contained only a few more clothes, a pair of feminine shoes, and a rag doll made to look like a gremlin with a big silly grin stitched on its face.
Finding nothing else of great significance, Jallin decided he’d explore further, hoping to find something of worth or interest before Counselor Yubrin came back upstairs. He stopped at the door.
A window? How was there a window? This room wasn’t facing the front or the back of the house, and on either side, the house was sharing a wall with another. Jallin even heard something on the other side of the wall, someone laughing or coughing. How was this window here?
He walked to it carefully, as though afraid it might fall or explode. The window looked like a real window. His fingers were cold against the glass. He pushed on it a little, half-expecting the illusion to fall apart at his very touch.
He’d met windows like these before, once when he broke into a house with Stasser. Very simple. A very simple hook held the lattices shut. Flipping it out of the way, he pulled the windows, but they were not designed to open inward. He pushed at them, and strangely, they opened, but not towards the sky or out onto the gardens. Instead, they opened onto a hallway: the hallway they’d passed through to get to the stairs. Now, Jallin was back on the first floor again. He turned round to see the bedroom gaping at him from behind. What was this?
On the other side of one of the window lattices was a painting of some pretty girl in a fancy dress of lace that looked uncomfortable to wear for her, though it did accentuate her cleavage, making her breasts look like two loaves of bread. Jallin found himself staring at them for a brief moment. On the other lattice was just bare wall. But there was no doorway or opening, or even a frame for it here; the wall merely opened up. The paint ended in one place and began in another. He closed one side of the window, the left side with the painting, and the wall continued to be wall just as before, as though nothing had ever opened it. There weren’t even tattered places where one part of the wall ended and another began.
He went back through the windows and closed them behind. He decided it was time to look into the other rooms. He hadn’t felt anything going back and forth through this little portal, and he wondered why they couldn’t just make travelhouses work that way: simply a door one stepped through to get somewhere else.
He found a tea room, this one actually overlooking the garden with a normal window. He decided he needed a little fresh air so he opened the window. Then, he sat down at the little unset table and pretended he was looking at the girl from the picture. Now, she was smiling, despite the frilly dress. Now, as she breathed, he could watch her breathing. He liked dresses that made a woman’s breasts sort of squeeze together and rise and fall with their breaths. Sometimes, he even wanted to chase after a woman just to see this movement.
He felt…funny…about such things, and sometimes he wondered what exactly he was supposed to do with a woman, and why he was supposed to do anything about them at all? Why did men drink themselves to stupidity and hang all over them? Why did the women seem to enjoy the attention?
Suddenly, with an imaginary teacup in hand, he wondered if there was some great secret he had missed somewhere because of his shabby upbringing. His father had disappeared right along the edges of his memories. His mother had taken poor and then taken sick. Aunty Hurga was disgusted entirely with Jallin, and no one gave him money to buy a day in school somewhere.
It occurred to him something might have been happening to him, with his body, he could not explain, and which no one had ever tried to explain to him. Would his mother have told him if she had lived? Would she have explained these…feelings…and reactions to women he’d begun to experience when he saw pretty ladies in pictures and walking down the streets? Would Counselor Dursus ever tell him why, when the prostitutes teased him about his age, he wanted to stop and see what more they would say to him, and why he thought their giggling at him was somehow interesting, why he shivered at a single touch to his cheek or shoulder? Would Kir-Tuko sit him down one day, pass him a piece of bread, and tell him: “Now, I tell ju how ju go avout vith vomen?” Were kinto-shah even like people in all these things?
He’d caught glimpses of people in alleyways with each other, the woman with her leg up in the man’s hand, her head tilted backwards until she leaned against the wall. He’d seen other things, too, but didn’t understand them, and if he was ever caught looking, the man involved would come after him as if to kill him.
Aside from the table and the little chairs around it, the room was made to be a place of entertaining and being entertained. A folded easel was leaned against the wall behind the doorway. A serving tray was hanging on the wall just beside the door, and the other wall adjacent held a fiddle aloft on hooks, complete with all its strings and its bow. Jallin took the instrument down and examined it.
“Here’s a find,” he thought. “Hmmm. Let’s have a look. Kunjel make. Wood…made of….” He smelled it and scratched at it with his fingernails. “It’s made of pieces of aberon wood. Hand made.” These instruments from Frosomia were often imported by kinto-shah and sold in fine shops and very hard for a thief like Jallin to get hold of without breaking in a place. Stasser bragged about knowing someone who had actually sold someone’s own instrument back to them.
Aside from the instrument, he found only a few paintings of places he doubted existed. One had peculiar houses sitting as though they were on stilts, with all manner of complicated interconnected walkways and platforms and blurry painted people walking along them. Still another merely represented a harbor at sunset with rotten ropes and birds resting here and there on pylons. Unlike the ports of Sarkoshia, which were veritable jungles of yelling workers, boxes stacked higher than buildings, slaves lashed from one place to the next, and animals in crates, this dock was tucked safely away in some serene cove: one dock, one boat with its sails limp like a toga, and just a little pleasant, rotting shack to keep it company. A pile of traps with broken slats lay in the foreground.
Jallin left the fiddle sitting beside the door to the tearoom and went further upstairs. Now he entered the master bedroom.
Again a four-poster bed, but sailors could not have squared away the silken curtains any better or more perfectly. The bedsheets were creased and perfectly straight, as though made of perfectly cut paper rather than cloth, and no wrinkle dared show itself. The bed reached across a huge circular carpet like a dock out into a bay. Across from the bed, standing on the other wall, was another wardrobe, this one larger than the last he’d seen. On either side of the bed a table with a little sunstone lamp, and the little amber-colored sunstones were still resting on top of the lamps.
These were cheaply made sunstones, the type that had to sit in the sun for perhaps days on end, and not polished and smooth but shaped like little pyramids. It would be nothing to take both sunstones. They weren’t even that large or expensive. Easily replaced. He had pocket enough.
Light from what Jallin guessed was a real window this time, poured in and spilled all over the other side of the room. It gently caressed a desk set just below the window, with a few pieces of paper scattered across the top. A small shelf to the right of the desk held various bottles of ink, probably dry, an extra sheaf of paper with strings tied around it like a gift, and three books that Jallin guessed were ledgers.
He stepped across the carpet, eager to see the writing he couldn’t read on the desk. Would the words come to him if he stared at them long enough? Wasn’t that how it worked? Isn’t that how people learned? Staring at pages until they figured things out?
His hands fell on the pages like birds landing in a park. The fingers crept over the writing, as though he would merely pick up the words directly off the page. He was looking out the window into the garden now, not really looking at the pages for a moment. The back garden was a lovely square of green with little bushes all around the sides along the walls. A single chair and a little table sat out there alone.
Now Jallin looked to the pages. He knew enough to recognize the difference between numbers and letters, at least in the Sarkoshian language, and he noticed that these sheets were lists of things. Down one side, all neat and tidy, were the numbers and on the other side were words to go with the numbers, but what was listed, how much of what, Jallin couldn’t say. He wasn’t even sure if he cared.
He opened one of the books and now he found something interesting: pictures. Sketches. Very intricate sketches. Maps. Maps of what, Jallin couldn’t say, but he knew a map when he saw one. Maps were very valuable. These might not be so valuable because they were just sketches, and Jallin couldn’t tell which was sea and which was land, so maybe it wasn’t done very well.
He found other sketches as well, sketches of animals, birds, and even a monster. It was a creature like nothing Jallin had ever seen, a big, angry looking thing, like a troll perhaps. It had tusks that stuck up from its bottom lips and a nose kind of like an animal’s, maybe like a pig’s or a cow’s. It had bulging muscles, but a bulging belly. It held in its hand a bush, pulled free from the ground, and some of the bush actually hung from its mouth. Despite how monstrous and powerful the creature seemed, it did not really look all that menacing; it looked from the page at Jallin like a man drinking a tankard in a bar might look at him, gruffly and with enough irritation to suggest Jallin stay away, but with no intent to intentionally go after someone.
“Hmmm,” Jallin grunted under his breath. “Othlegant, maybe?” Othlegants were legendary creatures of the Terrilian wastes, creatures legendary for their ability to recover from tremendous bodily harm and their ability to eat anything they wanted without ever getting sick. Jallin was surprised, actually, Counselor Dursus or Yubrin hadn’t suggested that as a mascot for Trochayabism. These creatures were almost as sought-after as dragons for their potent blood and flesh, rich with mystroskus, but no one knew if it was even possible to contain them.
Jallin pleased himself in identifying this creature. It had to be an Othlegant, and he’d known it only through his clever, hungry ears. He picked up the edges of the next page with his fingertips, thinking to himself that this was the way to education, to learn to read, merely flipping to pictures in books and knowing what they were pictures of. Before turning the page, he put his finger on the picture of the Othlegant, then slowly hunted around the page for the word for it. He decided the word below the picture had to be the right one, and he put his finger on top of it as though trying to keep it from wandering off the page. He stared at the word, at the shape of the word, at its parts. He decided the word had a skeleton, like a dead animal in an alleyway. If he stared long enough, the flesh that covered the bones would fall away and he would see the word for what it was, for everything he needed to know about it.
Something caught his attention, something in the garden. He looked up from the page in the book, but only moved his eyes.
A gincha. It stood alone atop the garden looking down into the garden. It wore a metal cap with metal guards shielding the sides of its rodent-like face, but its ears were open to the air. It held something in its hand, an object like a ball of snow. The moment it left the wall, landing behind the little table and chairs outside, another one jumped up on top of the wall, this one wearing a metal cap also, but this one carrying a little thornclub, about as long as Jallin’s forearm, but made of metal and covered with thin, nail-like spikes. This second gincha waited a moment, as the first had done, then landed in the garden as well and pressed his back against the wall.
Jallin left the bedroom and headed downstairs to the other bedroom. He didn’t have to enter the room before he saw them. Two narg guards escorting a putright and a cleanser.
Jallin had only seen a cleanser once in his entire life, during a public chastisement; he was certain after that, he never wanted to see another. Cleansers were the purifiers of the Mercelian order of knights.
The cleansers were not usually allowed to enforce laws or help the putrights, unless it involved enemies to both the mercelians and Sarkoshia. Particularly, when it involved Trochayabites. Lord Emperor Sarkelosh was always willing to have voluntary help in dealing with diseased people.
They stood at the gate to the front garden and talked to each other. The cleanser wore a square-shaped hat and the blue and gold scapular and robes of his order. On his chest, the eight-pointed golden sun shone bright yellow with sparkling fringes, as though his heart was exploding in a fiery ball of magic. He draped shackles around his neck like they were necklaces.
The putright wore red and black robes, like a priest about to attend a sacrifice, and gold chains of his authority. Was he from the university?
The putright picked up the lock on the chain at the gate and stared at it for a moment. Then, he seemed to whisper at it, and the lock opened and the chain fell away. He sent the narg guards ahead of him, to go towards the front door of the house.
Jallin remembered again how the windows worked in this room. He unhooked them and opened them and tumbled out into the front hall. Already, the nargs were overshadowing the window set in the door. Could they see him? He hoped not.
He ran through the house, tumbled headlong over a chair in one of the parlors and rolled into a table. He heard something break. Perhaps they broke the window to get inside the house. He didn’t wait to see. He had to get downstairs, to the cellar.
He heard the nargs crashing through the door, too large to fit down the hall easily, but trying. A picture fell from the wall with a crash. The nargs growled and more breaking and crashing told Jallin they were not far now from where he was at the stairs. Soon, they would round a corner and see him, come charging through the sitting room with the fireplace and take him by the throat.
“Buffoons!” Jallin heard someone cry out. “Just make sure he doesn’t escape. Get out of my way, idiots!” Was it the putright howling in this way? Or was it the mercelian cleanser?
He fumbled with the doorknob to the cellar door, but finally got it open. Quickly, he darted within and closed the door behind him, where he waited in the darkness. The nargs’ feet sounded as though they’d crash through the floor, and whoever had spoken before ordered them to block the front door.
Jallin heard whispers downstairs coming from the cellar. He left the door and stumbled down towards the dim light below. He missed a step, twisted his ankle, staggered nearly to his knees and hurt his wrist bracing himself against the wall. He shouted, then waited.
“What are you about, Jallin? Why are you shouting?” came Counselor Yubrin’s voice from the cellar. “Why are you coming down here?”
“Quiet,” Jallin hissed. “They’ll hear you. We have to get out of here.”
“What did you say to me? Who’ll hear us? What are you talking about?”
“Mercelians. Mercelians and a putright. They’re here. They’ve come looking for us. Ginchas outside, nargs in the parlor, and the putrights looking for us. We have to get out of here.”
Counselor Yubrin, only a shadow in a dim lantern’s light, appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Jallin slumped, and felt Counselor Yubrin’s hands catch under his arms. The man, with strength greater than he appeared to have, dragged Jallin into the lantern light.
Apparently, the counselor had been busy. Scattered around on the floor were all manner of strange objects. A book lay open like a patient about to have its heart removed, a couple bottles of assorted liquids, a few scrolls. But what really drew Jallin’s attention were the two metal hoops laying one upon the other, close to the lantern. They shimmered, like nothing but magic could make something shimmer. It was a multicolored glean, something that really could not be seen directly, but sort of understood by the eye.
“What did you say about mercelians?” Counselor Yubrin said, turning Jallin’s face to his. “What’s going on. Be plain.”
“The mercelians are up there. A cleanser and some narg guards and a putright. We have to get out of here, or hide. Can we get out of here?”
Just at that moment, the door to the cellar was making noises. Someone was trying to open it. At present, it was merely a rattling of the handle. Any moment, it would be a squealing sound, and the putright would be down there with them, him and his narg guards, and their cleanser.
Counselor Yubrin released Jallin. He looked around, spinning in place for a moment. Then, he turned and walked towards a wall. He touched it, scratched at it with a fingernail, turned round and approached another wall. All four walls around them were made of stone.
The door was opening.
He looked to Jallin.
“Why are they here?” he asked him. “Did you summon them?”
“Summon them? How would I summon them?”
“Did you go outside? Did you open windows? What did you do?”
“Nothing. The window upstairs…it leads down to the hall.”
“What?”
Talking upstairs, in the doorway to the cellar.
“Damn you boy. What did you do?”
“I used a portal upstairs. These people have portals in their house. I found one and tried it, but that’s all. I didn’t do anything else.”
“Did you steal something? Did you?” Counselor Yubrin was nearly upon Jallin, raising his fist, but for the sounds coming from upstairs. A great lumbering noise could be heard, along with several low-pitched, but decisively annoyed grunts.
“I didn’t take anything,” Jallin said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“Have you any weapons, fool? You’re about to fight a narg.”
“I have nothing. Can you get us out of here?”
The trochiabite priest looked around again.
“Possibly. Not likely. No. Yes. I…”
“The narg’s coming. Get us out of here.”
The counselor went into his robes and withdrew the little wand he’d used earlier at the travelhouse. He held it like a crossbow for a moment. Then, he stepped towards the bottom of the stairs. He whipped it back and forth for a moment, then stared at the tip of it.
“Get behind me, boy. Get over there by the hoops. Do it now!”
The tip of the wand glowed, like a hot coal at first, then like a star. “This will not work well, but perhaps it will buy us a moment or two.”
He went to the bottom of the stairs and waved the wand back and forth. Wherever the wand went, it left a trail of light, as though the wizard were writing in the air. Once again, the picture he drew was a strange and incomprehensible mass of swirling circles and angles and straight lines. Then, all at once, the burning shapes and figures suddenly disappeared again.
“Now, get me some dirt, something to write in. Hurry.”
Just as he said this, the narg appeared. The shadows of the stairway seemed to breathe out, like a big nostril, and from them came a giant green shape. The narg easily filled up the hole in the wall where the stairs came down into the room, and from there seemed to expand. He had to stay hunched over or risk scraping his head against the ceiling. He carried a hammer-like club. Without so much as grunting, the narg took a swing at Counselor Yubrin.
He took a step forwards, but whatever it was Counselor Yubrin had done to the air between them, took effect. Jallin could not prevent himself from stopping and staring.
There was a sound like a hundred bees killing each other, and a sudden explosion of red and white, and the narg’s face twisted sharply with first an expression of surprise, then of pain. An ear-splitting wail poured from the narg’s mouth and filled the room like a gush of water.
The narg’s arm was ripped completely from its body and had gone…nowhere to be seen. Blood sprayed from the wound, completely painting the stones of the wall. The narg staggered back, clutching himself as though trying to hold his body together. What happened to his weapon, Jallin could not say. The narg fell backwards onto the stairs and breathed heavily for a moment, then howled again. In the midst of the turmoil, Jallin heard other voices, but could not tell what was said.
He remembered he was supposed to find dirt. What for, he couldn’t say. He was just supposed to find it. He found dust here and there, in the corners, underneath things.
“Put down a layer of dirt over there on that flat stone.”
Jallin had no idea what Counselor Yubrin was doing, but he tried to imagine it. He remembered how they had used the travelhouse, how he had written in the dirt with his wand, just like he had just written in the air with it. Perhaps he would write in this dirt, make a spell to take themselves out of here. He hoped he was doing right.
Another narg appeared, but could not get to them. The body of the first was in the way. This narg roared at them, like a vor or a kunjel would roar, but much more horrible. It leaped the last step and landed where the first narg had taken its swing at Counselor Yubrin. It didn’t walk forward; it waited for the attack, to try and defend against it. But the wizard had already turned his back and come to where Jallin was.
He growled at Jallin and knelt down. His wand, for a moment, hovered over the patch of dust and dirt Jallin had accumulated. He was muttering something in his head. Then, suddenly:
“Which way does the front of this building point?”
“What?”
“The front of the building. Which way is it?”
“I...I don’t know…I don’t know these things.”
“Maybe he knows it?” Counselor Yubrin growled. “Which way is the sunset, damnit?”
“I…I….” Jallin looked at the narg, who was already beginning to believe he could advance. He remembered something. When the gincha arrived, the sun was in the sky behind them. They stood on the wall for a moment in the sunset. “The sun was setting in the back garden. That way’s west. There were gincha outside and they….”
“Shut up.”
The narg took another step forward and Jallin expected the same thing to happen to him as what happened to the other, but it didn’t. The spell was gone. The narg was moving carefully forward, and now behind him came the cleanser and the putright. This narg had an iron glove with spikes on it. In the seconds while Counselor Yubrin worked, Jallin’s mind pictured that great, iron-clad hand blocking out all the light, the huge fingers wrapping around his skull, the headache and the ever-lasting darkness.
Counselor Yubrin clutched at his own head as though his skull was breaking with his calculations. His wand hovered over the dirt patch, but he made no mark in it.
“The sun, at the back of the house? You’re sure?” Counselor Yubrin asked without looking at Jallin.
“Yes, get us out of here.”
Jallin picked up a bottle of something, not willing to wait for Counselor Yubrin to cast another spell. He threw it at the narg. With a ‘ding,’ the bottle ricocheted off the narg’s head and went spinning towards the ground. The two behind the narg watched in absolute horror as the object made its way in a perfect arch to the stone-covered floor and there shattered and splashed.
The bottle’s contents turned instantly to smoke that rose terribly and billowed outwards from where the bottle fell, threatening to entirely fill the room. It swirled, as if with a will, towards the narg and the narg stopped moving, as though frozen in place.
“The boy threw a damned flugoboth,” cried the putright. “Get him before he finds something worse to throw.” He was talking to the cleanser, who drew a short sword. “Kill him if you have to, but keep the wizard alive.”
“What if he’s got another spell out.”
“He doesn’t. He won’t. Go. Go.”
Jallin looked at the ground. Another bottle was near enough at hand. He grabbed it.
“Jallin,” Counselor Yubrin said. “Give me the hoops. Get them, now. Hurry, and we’ll be gone. Don’t throw anything else.”
Jallin saw the hoops, gleaming as if they knew how valuable they were. He grabbed them and held them out to Counselor Yubrin.
While Jallin was trying to hold off the others, Counselor Yubrin had drawn a peculiar shape in the dirt. It looked very similar to the others he’d made. It had to be a portal. They were free.
Jallin held the bottle over his head, threatening to throw, and the cleanser stopped. “I’ll throw it,” he bluffed. He had been lucky with the first bottle, but he didn’t know what was in this one. It could be something really bad.
“Young Jallin,” said the putright, holding up his hands, “you will not throw that bottle.” Jallin looked at him, and wished he hadn’t. The man’s eyes held his gaze. The sound of his own name entered into his ears like a strange song and he felt himself captivated by the sound of it. “Jallin, do you hear me?” said the putright. All Jallin heard were his name and “hear me.” The putright was casting a spell on him, as they did.
“Jallin, Jallin, Jallin, Jallin,” the putright said. It was like nothing Jallin had ever heard. It was like everything good his mother had ever said to him, each and every compliment he’d ever received, had been dumped on top of his head from a bucket full of blessings.
For only a moment, Jallin could turn his head to look at Counselor Yubrin, who shook his head, took the hoops in his hands and leaned forward over the mark he’d made. He was gone.
The putright’s words held him just as well as the ‘flugoboth’ held the narg.
Whatever the putright said to him, Jallin could not really say. What he heard were friends speaking to him. Jallin had never had many friends before, but he couldn’t imagine even true friendship feeling like this. He would do nothing else to risk harming the putright, nothing at all. The putright loved him. The putright wanted only what was best for him. The putright would care for him, feed him, tell him he was a ‘good boy’ and would tuck him in at night.
Jallin believed in the putright. He put the bottle down. He didn’t remember being commanded to do it. He just did it. He stepped towards the putright, around the narg. He came towards the putright apologizing, wanting the putright to like him, no, to love him.
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