...into a corner.
A blanket about your shivering shoulders,
a book in your shaking hands -
I am with you 'cross the re'ranged boulders
an' these recurred lands.
“This blanket smells of warmth, of home?”
“Yes, and a tale to take you there.”
∞
The Timeless Tayl -
Shadows of Amneshay
Act I
Chapter One
Candle smoke. Shay slipped with a smile out of the warped window, unheard and unseen, her dark waist-cloak and leathers matt against the high moonlight. After fetching her swords from the windowsill and fastening them to her belt, through her mask she could see the towers of cloudy Courtdom floating as she descended along the outside of the tower, finding footing and groove in the bricks. She was glad to have practiced this route repeatedly before the full theft took place. Her razored instincts spotted before any of her other senses that a guard was patrolling the street below her. Shay sighed to her thoughts:
‘You are not supposed to be there…’ She’d already spiked the guard’s tea with something to help them dream.
She cannot have miscalculated, something else was at work. She glanced quickly back into the room and everything was as it should be - robbed. A grandclock tall to the ceiling was watching her leave.
∞
The guard below passed by in the same steps and solid manner as she had already seen earlier. Why was he calm, raising no alarm?
“Don’t cough…” she murmured quietly and began to feel even stranger.
The guard leaned his hand on the brickwork below to steady himself, and emptied severe coughs into his other hand. He started a rummage in his pockets for a cloth. Shay had predicted everything, having already seen him do it. Holding on with one set of fingers wedged into the brickwork, she checked her own pockets finding only dread. Her pockets were empty of her prize: a pouch or tiny jar of some very particular tea seeds, the same she had looted moments before climbing out of the window. Her confident smile left her. Her shadow had strangely moved, and the moon was in an entirely separate part of the barren-star sky, settling almost into darker Night. Longer shadows.
∞
Shay knew who she was and where, but not when. She looked across Township Imirka over to a distant temple, then another and more, but all the giant clock-faces were invisible to her: just oak or stone where numbers and hands should be turning.
∞
She tried to clear her vision by blinking, rethinking or lifting down her mask a moment: but nothing helped - her eyes were clear. Peeping through windows to bedside dressers where clocks long have lived, she found there in every home again - devices ticking or not - all without faces.
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∞
She soon was running from shadow to shadow through slip-cobble streets, trying to brush spider webs off her waist-long cloak, checking each unsettling corner of every building before moving on, her mind on the hilts of her swords. Halting her breath a moment and listening closely she heard small footsteps slapping her way. It was one of The Dam’e’s little spies, a girl wearing clothes too big for her, half her head woven into four thick locks of hair and the other shining bald against the moonlight. The inexperienced girl had not seen Shay, and making such a stomping racket with her bare feet was apparently making every effort to be visible. Shay focused her eyes on the child to test their instincts and it was not long until the child froze, turning with terror to face Shay knowing she had been spotted. Her terror soon abated seeing Shay’s familiar mask, and the girl smiled into relief.
‘I don’t know you.’ Shay thought.
As the child tried to creep closer through ever longer shadows, Shay could see she was unsightly with hunger. Two tusks jutted out from her jaw. The more she moved with thumps and stomps the less a little spy or thief she seemed.
‘What’s going on?’ Shay waited in the covering darkness. ‘The Dam’e would not allow this to happen.’
Herself no stranger to theft and killing, she was still shaken by the grim sight of hunger; the sort of thing Courtdom cured long ago.
∞
“Come with me.” Shay whispered, giving the girl little choice.
She picked the bony figure up with ease before checking again those same unsettling corners where grew the thickest glowing moss; Anything could have waited poised behind them all. The girl clung to Shay’s neck very weakly, her weird clothes covered in a dark sand glistening as they went through the wet moonlight. Voices were shouting in the streets, looking for someone or something. The paths Shay chose as she ran were not random, favouring those less guarded and wondering all the same where all these armoured guards were coming from. And why. Glimpses of them she caught. None they caught of her. They were shouting to tighten formations in their search:
“Find the girl would you, damn you!”
"Over here, Gargarensyr!"
Bulbs brighter than any moon shot down from above, glaring from searchships never before seen. Scanning. Unblinking. Shay tapped at the implant near her ear to contact her partner but the device would not respond. The girl spoke to Shay:
“It won't work without Time. Stop, then left and left again.”
Shay stopped and crept to a crossroads and in her waiting the next street erupted with burning violet light from one of the searchships above. A moment later they would have been completely exposed.
∞
Shay felt the world tilting over. The Courtly Township of Imirka itself an island in the sky floating, twisted and churned with unease, as what powers there be tried to shake and rattle-free the part they were looking for. Earthquakes withstood, Shay knew The Court was not looking for her: not over a pouch or jar of tea seeds, valuable as they may be. She grit her teeth, checking again her pockets and harness, confirming the seeds were still not there. After shaking her head, when at last the street again was dark she made quick her pace across it with the girl squeezed in her arms.
∞
“How did you know about the lights?”
“There’s been a murder in Heirarchy.” The girl replied, her voice needing rest and water. “All Courtdom’s in a rage about it! The Heir herself has murdered someone - they won’t say who. No prison can hold her… her body is still inside, but all the rest of her has already escaped.”
Shay headed left then left again avoiding light and finally found tucked between two dark houses the disappointed gaze she had been waiting to find. Woid was there shaking his head, leaning relaxed against the shadows as a grate into the tunnels below lay open at his feet. His fancy silken party clothes did not befit his profession. Dressed for a ball or some other pageantry he raised an eyebrow, tapping above his ear at a device unseen and dysfunctional:
“Why or how are you back already? And who is this?”