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Chapter: Shadow's Bane
I went looking for my temperamental roommate, to make sure she was okay, but she wasn't in the kitchen. Or in the dining room or the pantry. I finally went out onto the back porch, where I almost stumbled over the boys, sitting in the middle of the floor with their heads down, gravely intent on something. And finally spotted Claire, out in the garden with a basket, snatching sheets off a line. Because yeah; everything in the house had probably needed washing. I moved to help and had a finger pointed at me and then back at the porch, which was stupid; I felt fine. "I feel fine," I told her. "Get." I got. At least the voice was back to normal. I squatted in the floorboards to see what the boys were up to. They had the chess box out here, in the big open space in front of the swing. And I guess whatever the house had done to the pieces had been temporary, because they were back to their usual size and inside their beautiful landscape of a game board. But not back to their usual habits. Something was up. It was normally hard to see everyone at once, because the two camps weren't all that close together. They would have been on a normal chess board, but this wasn't one. It served as a window onto a bigger world, and could be moved around to show the different areas: fields, streams, forests, a group of shallow grottos, and an open plain between the settlements where most of the action took place. But in between skirmishes, the groups tended to be pretty spread out, going about their tiny business, foraging, building, walking guard duty, or whatever. Only not now. I didn’t need to move the board around to find them, because they were already gathered together on the central plain, although they weren't fighting. Guess they'd had enough of that last night. I wasn't sure what they were doing, but it appeared to involve hauling around a lot of little pebbles. Of course, to them they weren't pebbles, but good sized boulders that were usually stockpiled for hurling at each other's heads. But they weren't hurling them now. They were lugging them in from all over the map, piled in carts and slung in sacks over burly backs, only to dump them in the center. They were making a mountain of pebbles and I didn’t know why. I sat down to watch them, and to see what the boys were doing, because there was obviously some serious stuff happening with them, too. Stuff that involved scraps of tinfoil and glitter and glue, plus some rhinestones Claire must have dug up somewhere. All of which, I finally realized, were being used to make what were obviously meant to be medals. For the troops, I thought, grinning. I went to work helping Aiden, who was having trouble. Stubby, one-year-old fingers are not designed for detailed work, and his medals were mostly piles of misshapen glue strewn with glitter. Stinky's, on the other hand, were amazing. Like the armor he'd crafted out of old aluminum cans, they were tiny masterpieces: delicate frameworks of silver foil, a single rhinestone mounted with tiny prongs and glue, and the whole hung from a braided necklace of ribbon and threads of some kind of shiny gold wire. "That's . . . really good," I told him, and had a fuzzy face turn up to me, beaming. I remembered the Duergars I’d taken him to, shortly after I found him at an illegal auction run by dark mages. They'd been selling halfbreeds, the result of some kind of experiments our enemies in faerie had been doing, only these were the rejects, the ones thought to be failures. Being a halfbreed myself, I’d sympathized, and had ended up with something between an adoptee and a pet that I didn’t know what to do with. So I’d tried to find him a home among his people, or half his people anyway, since I didn’t know any Brownies. But there was a local colony of Duergars, a type of dwarf who are not evil, as some tend to think, but who do rate pretty high on the antisocial meter. It had taken me a while to finagle an audience, and once I did, they spent five minutes telling me that my baby was an abomination before throwing me out. I’d adopted Stinky for good after that, because fuck them. The funny part of it was that, other than for being dicks, Duergars are mainly known for one thing: their high level of craftsmanship. They are among the greatest armorers of faerie, making beautiful pieces that often become heirlooms thereafter. And it looked like our little halfbreed had inherited all their skill and then some, because he'd never even had any training. Yet they hadn’t wanted him. Good, I thought, combing my fingers through his soft, thick hair. They didn’t deserve him. I helped Aiden make a few halfway passable medals, although both of us together didn’t rival Stinky's. I kind of felt bad for the little guys who would get stuck with our shoddy workmanship. I glanced back into the box, to see how they were fairing. And stopped, blinking. And then just sat there, wondering what we were supposed to do now. Of all the weird things that had happened lately, I thought this might take the cake. Because the little guys had used the rocks like stranded sailors on a beach. Only they hadn’t spelled out HELP, because they couldn’t spell. But they'd spelled out something. Or, to be more precise, they'd drawn something, using the rocks to make an outline that looked a lot like their stairway to heaven. Or, you know, a fern frond. Stinky was peering in now, too, a couple of his masterpieces in hand. "They’re lovely," I told him again. "But I don't think they want medals." He looked at me quizzically. "I think they want out." The house might have shrunk them again, but it hadn’t put them back. Not really. Because some of the changes seemed to have been permanent. And that presented a problem, didn’t it? "What is it?" Claire asked, coming over with a basket of freshly dried sheets. "I think they read Plato." "What? Dory, they’re just enchanted toys. They can't . . ." she looked inside the box, and stopped. "What is that?" "The Allegory of the Cave." "What cave?" Olga asked, looking up. Trolls know caves. "It's a story," I told her. "Told by a smart guy once. A thinker." She nodded. Trolls know sages, too. "He said there were these guys who were born in a cave, and chained in one spot, so they couldn’t see out—" "Who chain?" "I . . . don’t really know. It doesn’t matter." "Why not matter? If they chain, how they eat?" "I guess people brought them food." "Then why those people not let them out?" "I—Olga—" "Maybe it was the same person who chained them that brought them food," Claire offered, glancing at me and biting her lip. I shot her the "you’re not helping" look, but doubted it did any good. "But why feed if chain?" Olga asked again, frowning. "No can work if chain. What they do?" "I don’t really know what they did," I told her. "Maybe they were miners or something." "No. No can mine in one place. Ore run out." I sighed, because trolls know mining, too. "Look, can we leave off the chain? Let's just say they were trapped, okay? Trapped so that they could only see the wall in front of them, and the shadows of things that passed by outside—" "How they trapped?" Olga interrupted. "Why no one dig out?" "It sounds cruel," one of the guards agreed. I looked up to see that some of them had drifted over, because the fey love stories. "We mine in our mountains, too, but we take precautions. Your people have much to learn." "They weren't miners, all right?" I said, getting exasperated. "They didn’t mine!" "Then what were they doing in the cave?" "They were born there!" "Why would anyone give birth in a cave?" "And why wouldn’t they leave immediately thereafter?" Another fey put in. "It sounds far too dangerous for a babe." "I've heard that humans are so fertile, they can afford to be careless," a third put in. "Their women can have twenty, thirty babies in their lifetimes." Several others looked shocked, and then seriously impressed. "We do not have thirty babies," I told them, but they didn’t seem convinced. "Trolls have babies in caves," Olga said. She thought about it. "Some trolls." "Yes, but troll babies are quite . . . resilient," the first fey pointed out. "Humans are more—" he cut off, as if looking for a word that wasn't offensive. And kept on looking. "It’s an allegory," I said, trying again, although I no longer remembered why. "It didn’t really happen—" "The best stories are those that didn’t really happen," one of the fey pointed out. "Is there a battle in this one?" "No. No battles." "Is it a love story?" another asked, hopefully. And then glanced around at his fellow guards, who were staring at him. "Not . . . not that I like that sort of thing." "I like ones with battles," the first fey said. "Tell one of those." "We've had enough battles around here already," another said dryly, while the others started arguing about what sort of stories they liked. "It's a special story, to illustrate a point," Claire told them. "What point?" "That you can’t put the genie back in the bottle." She was looking at the little guys in the box, who were looking back although they didn’t know it. All of them were just standing there, around their frond, staring at the sky. "One of the men eventually got out of the cave," I said, because the fey were looking confused. "And saw the real things he'd previously seen only as shadows. Plato said that he could be caught, could be put back in the cave, could be chained up again, just like before. But that it wouldn’t matter. He'd seen a larger world, and his life would never be the same. He would never again mistake shadow for substance. He could never really go back." The fey thought about that. "So," one finally asked me. "When does the genie come in?" * * * "There." I sat back on my heels, with filthy hands, but a sense of satisfaction. "What do you think?" Claire squatted down in the dirt beside me, and peered under the house. The porch had a good amount of open space beneath it, striped with sunlight filtering in from gaps in the boards, and slanting in the sides from the yard. There'd been a decorative lattice once, covering the gap, but a lot of it was gone now and the rest was rickety and covered by tall grass and dandelions, because it was tough to mow over here. "Need to get the weed eater fixed," Claire noted, pushing aside some of the grass. And leaving us looking in at the start of a village. It wasn't much right now. But I’d fixed our little guys a decent-sized cleared space in the dirt, built up a bit in case it rained, and put their huts from the chess board inside it. There was a source of water, assuming they needed it, in the form of a leaky garden spigot we'd been meaning to get fixed but I guessed not now. There was game, in the form of lizards and bugs and the tiny brown mice Claire kept insisting we didn’t have because then she'd have to kill them. And there were all their accoutrements from the old camps: miniscule weapons, tiny baskets, blacksmith supplies, and carts. It was still kind of shabby looking, next to what they'd left, but I guessed they could fix it up. Or they could go home, because I’d left the game board there, too, its almost glaringly bright fields and rolling hills propped up against a column, so they could enter and leave as they liked. Only they didn’t seem to like. There was a lot of excited looking and running around, checking out the new digs and moving stuff to places they preferred it, because I was a crap designer. But only a few stayed very long. The rest girded on their weapons and set out in twos and threes to explore: the mysterious darkness farther under the house; the sunny lands beyond the safety of the stairs; the vast rolling landscape of the backyard, the limits probably farther than any of them could see. And populated by frightening giants and dangerous dragon-like lizards and the occasional dreaded saber-toothed house cat from next door. The back yard was a scary place, if you were two inches tall. "It's nice," Claire told me. "But what if they wander out of the yard?" "I think it might take them a while." "Yes, but . . . we can’t just have them walking down the sidewalk, attacking people's ankles!" "The magic that animates them is here, at the house. I don’t think they can go too far," I reassured her. Only it didn’t seem to. "Then they’re still trapped," she said softly, watching them. "Maybe. But it’s a bigger world now. And one where they have a lot more control." Claire didn’t say anything for a moment. Just watched one of the few homebodies trying to drag over some twigs for a fire. They were like tree trunks to him, so it wasn't working too well. He finally realized this and took a tiny axe off his belt and set to work, carving them down to size. "I heard you, last night," she finally said. "Talking to Caedmon." "I did a lot of talking to Caedmon last night." And screaming, and bitching, and various other things he probably wasn't used to. She side eyed me. "On the porch. It's right under my window." "Okay." "So you think I should do it? Call my father for him?" Trust Claire to cut to the chase. It was oddly refreshing after dealing with vampires all the time, who were rarely straightforward about anything. Of course, it was also harder to dodge. "I think you should call your father," I told her slowly. "But not for Caedmon." I got the full face treatment this time. I crumbled up some tiny pieces of wood, and rained them down on the little homebody, because he wasn't getting too far. He stood there, hands outstretched, looking around in amazement. And then began gathering them up, a great armful, and ran back to camp. As if to tell everyone that it rained wood in this crazy new place. "I don’t know if I ever told you," I said, "but I spent a lot of time tracking down dhampirs through the years. I couldn’t accept that my fits were just the way things were, and that there was no cure. So I went looking for one. And looking, and looking . . . . "There are more out there than you’d think, if you’re persistent about it. But it didn’t matter. Most were completely crazy, and tried to kill me, and the rest didn’t know any more than I did. I finally gave up. "But, if there had been some big group of sane, knowledgeable dhampirs, who could have helped me figure things out, you can damned well believe I’d have found them. Even if I had to scale Everest." "While all I have to do is call my father." I shrugged. "I just don’t see why you have to struggle through this alone." She shook her head. "He offered help; I didn’t want it. It's . . ." she bit her lip. "You were right, what you told Caedmon. I wanted it to go away. The more time I spent with my father's people, the more real it felt. I left in a panic. I just . . . wanted to go back in the bottle." "The bottle can be nice," I said looking at the happy, sunny landscape of the chess board. "The bottle is a lie." It was harsh. "We are what we are." She got up and left. I didn’t follow, because I didn’t have anything else to say. Instead, I watched a little guy with a couple buckets over his shoulders head off for the swamp the leaky faucet had created under the stairs. It was kind of hypnotic, watching them go about their daily routine. Made you forget your own problems for a while. And wonder if anybody was up there, watching us the same way . . . . Somebody thumped me lightly from above, and I jumped. And stood up, staring around, my heart pounding. Only to see a fey standing on the porch. "You have company." "What?" I asked, my head still in another realm. "At the front door." "Who is it?" The fey shrugged. "Says he's your son." |