Lands recurred. “Come on, let’s move - but you need to explain that to me. What tale?”
They set off hand-in-hand and Serib answered:
“Something Lay’d Payn is obsessed with - always, since I was older-than: The Timeless Tayl.”
Shay thought it all over in this way and that way, measuring everything carefully - coming repeatedly to the same conclusion: Serib, sadly, made even less sense than before.
∞
Though finally she had been given that word she, the guards and others had been searching for when scratching at clocks that once did work: ‘Time’. Time was being strange ever since she stole the seeds. Or had tried to steal them. No sense or tense of Time remained since. The idea that Time had been murdered up in High Courtdom did not sit with Shay; it sank - the ramifications incomprehensible, and how can one slay one of the four dimensions on which all is built? She wondered if the clocks losing their faces was a way for Time to defend itself, or it was as blood washing ashore. Proof of the worst.
∞
Compulsively Shay checked the seeds again, realising they now were fuller leaves and accompanied by tinier flowers. ‘How?’ She recognised the citrusy scent and flavour they would brew, the smell escaping somehow. Shay mentioned this in passing to Serib and the girl envied the power of Shay’s eyesight in this lack of light, fumbling as she was with touch and sound, not much enjoying any of the smells.
∞
Serib, holding Shay but also reaching at the walls, her hand bumped into a metal rod. She could smell something being toasted or roasted that she much preferred:
“There’s a ladder here?” The little shaman tapped her hand around.
“What is it?” Shay asked.
Serib’s hand patted at the ladder trying to get a better grip, and she blurted out another riddle she was recalling:
“When you smell toast, tell Shay about the black-sand coast: ’Turning the ages that are as pages: future-up the beach, past is down, inland the present waits - and do not go into the waves.’ It only makes sense to Lay’d Payn, that’s how she wants it to be.”
Shay with a glance examined the crawlspace-door above, the ladder, and thought of how many leagues away the nearest beach was, and so on. The exact number of leagues alluded her. The riddle seemed of little relevance, and she was not sure why this juncture in particular had prompted Serib.
∞
“These riddles help you a little, but-tut there’s more to it. Why give them to you if they only make proper-sense to her? Were you old-told to say them?”
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Serib nodded. Shay’s mouth felt strange, uncontrollably stammering words together that somewhat belong. Serib tried to explain:
“Lay’d Payn’s enemy that is also her friend, Fate, is reading everything we do.” Hardened a rogue as she was, Shay shivered as Serib continued: “I think it does make sense… that ladder, who lives at the end?”
“When I was this age… it’s a new bakery.” Shay noticed the ladder was far from the new landmark close to home she had grown to recognise whenever walking this way. Rust coated every rung. “The owner is known to visit Dam’e’s club.”
Shay had read Serib’s intentions.
∞
At the top of the ladder, climbing shakily such was the heavy medicine in her harness and shoulder gauzed over, Shay placed her ear to the hatch. A rat or cat was pawing around, whiskers sweeping the floor. The hatch was not locked - as it creaked open a feeble padlock slid away into a clang, startling the rodents’ making meal and home among forgotten crumbs, where a busy kitchen should have been. A Shadow watched her close the hatch, little that she knew it. At the base of the ladder again, Shay pensively rested her hands on her thighs, staring hard at a spot on the curving wall. Serib spoke over the thoughts:
“I think going through doorways or similar things, puts us from one Time to the next. Lay’d Payn used the no-word ‘Corridoors’ to me. Doorways and arches can take us to the past, present or future - leaving the station was one, entering or leaving your shop was another.”
“It’s only been happening since the station… far as we know. I like your thinking. However…” Shay walked to the spot she had been eyeing, bringing Serib with her to ask:
“Do you see this?” she snapped another branch from her harness for the girl to better see, the twig bright with sparkly fire.
∞
And there on the curving wall were scratches deep as fingers. Light from the broken twig crawled inside. In erroneously large letters ran letters and sentences, in dripping red or scabbed darker to Shay’s eyes, as she and Serib read what there spoke to them:
“Ignore the tenses; the dimensions are all vying to be foremost, given murdered happenstances. It only makes sense to me, and let us keep it so lest Fate learn scheme and script. Hurry now to The Dam’e Dominae, as you were. I have it all planned for you, yet my Enemy has begun their counterattack.”
Reality shrunk and expanded. Just as Shay had felt ‘watched’ by the eyes of The Ersecutor in the station, she imagined now some even greater and more terrible omnipotence. Trying to remain calm despite the ever-deepening scope of things, she touched the letters, their scale made by fingers smaller than hers. They were painful to touch.
“These were scratched into the wall?” She thought it unimaginably strange that more pain had been endured to add punctuation to this carved message.
Some letters were wet and bloody in her fingers, others were drier than the rest, and so explained to her their lighter or darker colours, the blood old or newer. Though how ‘attack’ was darkest when surely it has been written last, added to the many mysteries.
∞
Shay sensed a presence was close and pulled Serib closer to her, though the little shaman was struggling to stand in front and protect her protector. Both Shay and Serib’s nerves met the echo of footsteps not their own.