Turn Left
You turn left, the ice in your bones keeping you steady and numbing your feet enough that you can walk. You let the knowing muscles bunch in your thighs and calves, carrying you from shadow to shade as if you were a dancer in another life. But dancers have the luck of the devil, and perhaps a dancer wouldn’t have died in silver. The corridor takes you upwards, and you took the blond guard’s lantern to guide your path. The other you killed, clumsily- too close to him and grappling past his blind arms to his throat. You left them both in the cell, their heads hanging beside the hanging ropes of silver- a box of puppets and their slack strings, you thought. Ironic.
You trod over the red lady’s ashes to go, and now you ignore the suspended figures in their cages to your right. There is nothing you can do for the dead, or those who sleep too deep like the dead.
You are making for the renegade duke. Bathoset. His name comes back to you from behind silver bars, and you use it as the needle of your compass.
The floor begins to slope upwards: you go with the slope, letting your useless tail drag on the flagstones behind you as you fall to all fours and lope. The easier movement gets you up several short flights of stairs, chasing half-familiar smells and sounds down a long, plain gallery. You are a body of foreign objects, watching the parts of you that run as if from tunnel’s end.
Perhaps you are dreaming that your legs buckle, that stone breaks up in a sure tide from your head to your hips.
You collapse.
When you come to yourself, you are lying on your side beside warm clay oven in a still kitchen that stretches beyond your short horizons, disappearing into a thicket of counter legs and trestles. Heat pens you in on both sides: to your right, it spills from a long hearth, banked well and now down to coals and glow. With a question forming in the baring of your thickened pink gums, you stare at the rough brown wool pooling around your outstretched arm.
“You’re safe, though I wouldn’t answer for how long that’ll last,” someone remarks. “I surely can’t keep you. There’s too much work to be done in keeping my own hide.”
You say nothing.
“Cat got your tongue? I’d advise you to keep it that way. The muzzle is disconcerting: I can’t imagine you have the voice of an angel.”
“Do you know me?” you ask, wondering.
“You’re clearly a Canny. That’s it. I don’t know you. And you need to be going, get out of my kitchens.” There is a little of the hysteric in the words, curling up the ends of statements just enough to make them question. Will you go? Will you?
You pull yourself up, tail flailing bonelessly, and look for him. A cracked voice, like a boy’s, but clearly male, anyhow, and perhaps older than it would sound.
There is nobody- just a kitchen fit for a duke, wooden worktops and fire pits, ovens and stoves.
“You’ve noticed I’m not going to parade myself out for you,” he says. “I won’t have you knowing my face. Yes, I’m Canny, but it’s minor- I’ve hidden it years. I’ve let you share my fire; I’ve given you one of the spare robes. I’ve done enough. Now, go. Look behind you- there’s a door, a small one. It’s the pantry. Go straight through, and the next door’s the winery. Take a left, and you’re in the Low Palace. Find your own way out. Die, if that’s what you’re wanting. I’ve given my dues, so never you turn back on me.”
What now?
Written by ouroboros666 on 16 July 2016
