Archive for the ‘Series’ Category
The Truant’s Tale
Thursday, February 12th, 2009
“You walked away,” said the tracker, putting his big boots and skinny ankles up on the desk. “Broke your apprentice contract with just months to go.”
“Yep,” said Eyve Aerial. “So?”
“So, I want to know why. So does the Central Square Sorceress. She says you were her best student.”
“What’s it matter? You found me. You’re going to take me back.”
He waved his hand like a leaf fluttering down. “I’m not sure what I’m going to do.”
She figured this was some game he was playing; she wasn’t sure she had the patience to see what it was.
“I’m good at knowing why people do what they do. That tells me what they’re going to do next.” He stared at something on the toe of his shoe. “With you, I never figured out why, so your what-nexts never made sense. So it took six months instead of six days to catch you.”
“Time flies,” said Eyve Aerial, “You know, tempus fugit…”
A year later, she came back. The timeslip spell had faded enough that he’d stood up. Another three months, he’d reached the door. He blinked his eyes slowly as sunset; he probably wouldn’t understand her if she spoke and she hadn’t found an answer yet anyway.
Another year, and Eyve Aerial, returned to the scaffolding-palace that was the Central Square Sorceress’ headquarters, made amends, did her penance, and resumed her journeywomanship.
The tracker showed up one morning, trailing cobwebs as he strode across the creaking plywood.
“Maybe you don’t know why you left anymore than I do,” he said, the drawl in his voice showing he was still a bit behind time. “Maybe that’s why you came back. To figure it out.”
“I knew exactly why,” she said. “When I figured out that the nightmares were premonitions, that I was supposed to become some grand metropolitan wizardess who did all kinds of good things, but couldn’t stop this one last, huge evil thing from happening.”
“So why risk resuming your studies?” he said. “What’s different?”
“You,” said Eyve Aerial. “If I’m going to be powerful enough to do the things I’ve seen, I should be able to keep myself from getting into impossible situations, unless some part of me wants to fail.” She tossed the tracker a gold coin. “I’m hiring you to spot that part of me, to know why it wants to destroy everything before it does.”
Eyve Aerial’s appeared a few times before, in The Courier’s Tale, The Apprentice’s Tale, and The Sorceress’s Tale.
Day Street
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
(From The Knowledge: An A-To-Zed Of That City We Almost Know)
It will probably be dusk by the time you turn onto Day Street. The brick house-fronts will be darkening with approaching evening; between the chimney-stacks, the blue is draining out of the sky. The lawns are converging, with the brickwork and the trees, into a mass of indistinct purplish-gray. Out of that dusk, the legs of lawn furniture gleam fitfully; the white fences holding in the back yards; the curtains in the windows. The pavement, stretching before you down the street and trailing perpendicular paths up to the stoops, luminesces faintly under your feet like a phosphorescent wake.
The air is soft along Day Street. Past your ears float breezes, and the sound of voices talking; not out here, on the sidewalk empty except for one walker, but coming from somewhere very close, just over a white fence, just around the corner.
As you pass the house, a light comes on behind the translucent curtains. There is a movement of shadows in the window; a barely audible clatter of silver, a muted murmur of conversation. Up and down the street, just like in Magritte’s painting The Empire of Lights, the streetlamps are flickering on.
Above the roofline, the chimneys and the satellite dishes have been reduced to silhouettes. Above them, in a band of limpid blue, one bright star is coming out in the west. Very high up, a curve of light has pooled, like a rim of salt along the edge of the world.
A person could stand here for quite some time, looking at the streetlights, the sky. But it is possible that it may be time to lower your eyes, to move on down the street. It is possible that you have someplace you need to be.
The air you move through down Day Street is grey and gentle, cool and faint, suspended between the darkness and day. The pavement is an auroreal glow beneath your feet. In the darkened houses, all down the street, the lights are beginning to come on in the windows. The silver is starting to clink.
In the dew-laden grass, the flowers yawn. The wind is bright and silent: clear, cool, clean-smelling, as the air is just before dawn. Seeping upward from somewhere behind the houses, behind the one bright eastern star, the sky is beginning to turn blue. As you pass beneath them, following the pale line of the madrugal pavement, the long row of streetlamps, one by one, begin to flicker out.