The contract. Amneshay vanished with skill Shay did not yet possess. She heard not a rustle throughout the shop and the thing returned, clasping in its ‘living’ hand a scroll, the roll once clasped shut by Courtly seal of wax or thick blood-more-likely, though it had since been opened.
“The other me’s just-rust with me. Bringing water for our tea. Looking out for things that will not come. Not another-bother of pesky hope after our failure, and I bury-merry them underneath, and the mushrooms glow for-from them so you can find your way here. Again and again.” Amneshay darted deep eyes at the valley of lost syringes scattered about the scummy floor. “You’re asking, so-low I’ll show you-two.”
‘No hope after what?’ Shay wondered getting more and more confused as the thing walked off away from her shuddering, dragging one of its legs until they gave it a knock with their fist, and the limb seemed again to work.
Shay coughed, recalling the glowing underworld Argus had chased her through, knowing now how the mushrooms grew as they do: from the food of her flesh, from different unsuccessful versions of her passing this way. Amneshay set about tea upon the shaking table, putting scratched plates without biscuits atop wriggling towels that now had their own minds and scarpered off the table.
∞
Shay realised Amneshay had already planted something in her hand. Unfurled in her shaking palm was an assassin’s contract, the sort she was much too familiar with. She scanned and measured trying to make sense of Amneshay’s languishing language. And it read as the contracts between assassins, burglars and their clients often will or do, with indiscernible codes and ciphers referencing agreements over more innocent things, leaving clear the gist for ‘those that know’. She saw her own name written crudely and underlined by a scratch, written as though in the rain against wet and fragile paper - and by a child’s hand.
“We were as small-not-tall as Serib when we agreed.” Amneshay grinded, clicking her jaw. “Smaller!”
The medicine strapped to Shay dragged her nearly to the needled floor, where the used spikes called out to her with their gnashes, as Amneshay dared mention the furthest past. The kettle piped out hotter clouds, caught by nervous candlelight. The calming tea smelt of rose and lavender. Amneshay called over to Shay for a sit-and-sip:
“Don’t-won’t get fret-pulled down. Tea’ll free you.”
Shay much agreed, pulling up what was once a chair and now a one or two-legged stool.
∞
Amneshay understood Shay’s reluctance to discuss the past, being herself the outcome of such sprawling things:
“I sat where you-two now do, in some page-age or aeon Once Ago.” She looked at her weak prosthetic arm holding the teacup. “Know-remembering does-not-will-not help, but I was told by me, and so I’ll tell you-too.”
∞
“Where did we go when we were small?” Shay asked, having only pieces, her poisonous medicine having numbed her pain and love as well. “Seeing Serib around the same size…”
“…brought-thought it all back.” Amneshay finished what Shay had begun. “Mother was sick-stick from a poison dart of someone smart; tripped the wrong wire on the right job.”
Amneshay rattled a syringe at Shay as both were settling into candle-lit tea, sitting uncomfortably. Shay watched everything Amenshay was doing, wary that she would end up ‘buried-merry’ or similar, in the tunnels underneath. Mushroom food. Amneshay was still rattling:
“This medicine is in you, so you won’t-don’t-want to know.” The thing reiterated or repeated. “When we were small-not-tall is when we first questioned: why-die and what if we needn’t? When mother was poorly with a silly cold that seemed bigger, long before the long funeral. And here are we at this table are from our hue-view ‘later’ in mangled-tangles; but you can take objects with you.” Amneshay pointed at the contract with a bony stump. “And they can remind-find the straighter flow. Harder for our foes to spot and track.”
Shay’s eyes traced over the rustling old parchment; her nose stung by the sharp smell of the ink. She started removing the props that changed her face, the coloured lenses and bigger nose, and her two maskless faces met. One rotting and whirring, the other a long way yet to go.
“Is that how-now I looked?” Amneshay recollected or could not, seeing Shay’s face.
∞
“Did I go with father to find a cure for mother?” Shay remembered a dark castle after a darker marsh, where moons and stars could not, and only lanterns of cardinal-red light lit forth the torrid way.
“You-two did, and the question is all The Lay’d needs; asking Why - dissatisfied with duality-reality. Ask Why and then you can hear-see her written schemes that once were woven; ask and be’pulled unto her tayl without a tail. Once bitten forever. The why’s and what if’s make us known to her and her known to us; make-shake thin the hidden veils of last-past dimensions. Time is dead, and so the other dimensions… un’destabilise. We drank-sank this very same tea in that castle, and so you’re better at remembering with the tea-scent than-when-you-would without it. Scent-sent!”
∞
Shay thought of the charred candle somesoul had left for her, halfway up the generator in the temple-factory, and where the scent of it sent her. To spiced porridge, to an evening. Seeing Serib safe in her slumber. She sadly could think of no better term than to borrow Amneshay’s ‘scent-sent’, hoping the loopy-looping thing across the table was not her only destiny. Her own thoughts and speech now-and-when slurring into stranger styles:
“Father had to turn back, at some-glum point.” Shay remembered with the scent of this rose-lavender tea, being alone in the crimson-leaning spires of a palace high above the dark castle, sipping the same tea here and there. Waiting and guarded, waiting to be seen; an audience granted.
“A royal summons.” Amneshay nodded, their neck cracking for no reason. “Just-us, in the Corridoors above the speaking-reeking manors sunken-drunken up by the swamp… and we met The Lay’d. Hiding from The Spine Eaters that once were monks, it is said.”
∞
“When we still were young-among, and signed this contract.” Shay wanted to inject the medicine again, as her mind and heart raged against each other, unable to reconcile.
“We sigh-signed the thing.” Amneshay sipped, slapping their tongue dissatisfied as though unable to taste, taking more care to sniff the hot drink and meditatively watch its motions swish around, preferring other senses.
“Why do I want to forget this?”
“Well-knell, you’ve none of your hope left, have you? Hoping means remembering what you’re might-fighting for-fore. Hoping means why-trying. Harder to make things than break things. Harder to stand up than ‘tis to sleep… where Grief is lord.”
“You mean, you don’t have any hope left.” Shay accused the decrepit creature, looking out for spiders and their pillow-webs. “I’m still fighting while you’ve given completely up.” She scratched her needled elbow, and the valley of a floor all pointed at her skin.
∞
Amneshay quoted at her: “…if the tayl is timeless, let’t be’told in a timeless way. You’re still booking-looking at things like this: one, two, three… but you are me and you are you, too. If I’m hopeless we’re both hopeless. There is no me and no you, only you-two.”
Amneshay then stumbled with a clumsy analogy, lining up the used syringes and their needles. She emptied whatever dust or drips still remained of them into her teacup as to salt or to sugar and swilled it around as she said:
“Moments and memories now-how are motes. Where-one-where-the-other? Ambiguity.” She looked at old alchemical and mixing equipment. “Not linear but jumbled. Clash-bashing. Constantly unstable. Only Hour Lay’d knows.”
∞
Stolen story; please report.
Shay did not understand or care for any of this:
“If you are me and have lost your hope, could you not too be hopeful if I still have my hope? ‘Timelessly’. If we are not the same soul in two places, but somehow the same soul altogether?”
A part-apart.
Amneshay chewed, likely unable to refute. “I wouldn’t-shouldn’t try-why to suss that. Only Hour Lay’d knows; if we know then so will her foe. Fate got into your-our head.” she chewed unable to swallow the tea, removing their jaw entirely for a messy moment to fix something in her throat, and the voice continued, and Shay was glad that candlelight barely showed what there was gurgling jawless words:
“It’s all about-bout what you believe. Can Lay’d Payn change reality-duality, and will we see the fore-shores The Great Freedom has seen? Where apparently goodness needn’t change-chaos-chance, in Eternity where Time cannot reach us, or some-such interpretation of Heir madness.”
Shay listened more closely, trying to shrug off a growing exhaustion:
“You’re still unclear as to who you serve, Payn or Fate, Lay’d’s both…”
∞
“You-two want to forget because there is no happiness out there, no way to strange-change reality, and Lay’d Payn’s hope is but a despair-dream wearing a mask. Powerless against the seams of Always.” Amneshay held a syringe up to the tea-brewing flame, to see if there was anything left inside. “There is no happiness after our parents die. And they had the best any could hope for, fading old and grateful-fateful, at the end of ever-unfinished ring-things. Truth was not enough for us. Gave her away…”
Shay closed her eyes, forcing out her unwelcome tears. She knows the soul Amneshay spoke of, a girl given away - a truth that needles and distance have helped Shay forget, a lie within herself indistinguishable that she has 'become to believe' - a lie that the sight of Serib sleeping disturbed, soothed. A truth that Shay will accept by tomes-end, and Grief will not know the hearth that is her heart.
“You-two were very weak in the wrong-strong way.” Amneshay said further to Shay, speaking to both of ‘herselves’. “Holding on; if we’re weak why can’t we let go? Others die and others move on, and then they die. And there she Our Lay’d was in her crimson palace after the dark castle after the darker swampland. Promising. There she was, when-then we needed her.”
Promising and promising.
∞
“But Fate got-rot into our head. And we remembered or realised or was-t’was reiterated to us, there is only reality. Duality. Not the fable Lay’d Payn is replanning. Rearranging. There is only-lonely the truth Courtdom towers itself rightly upon. There is only life and death in this Universe Duality. The ‘Verse of Lay’d Payn isn’t real.”
Shay tried to ignore Amenshay, already planning her route back to The Club. The old assassin continued, miserably as none would like to be:
“The Dam’e told you to embrace the escape, but there is no escape from Entropy, the enemy Lay’d Payn has chosen.”
Shay dug further into the depths of the blood-sealed contract, hoping clues may there wait.
“Enjoy your fore-tea, the last-past you’ll know for a while. You’ll always leave the way you entered, chasing away the sequence you’ve already sealed by leaving Woid and Serib where they were. That’s how this-that lineage goes, a deader and discarded tangent. A piece on a board with flesh inside, moved around. Constants the same and variables rearranged.”
∞
Finding in the many-paged contract nothing at all Shay liked the further she read of it, a flap of - what she hoped was not, but may well be skin - had been sewn into it with grotesque neatness. She held it to the flame of a candle, as to make my dire cuts legible. She did not read aloud:
“My Dear Amneshay, take some notice of yourself, but not all of it! Our sense of Sense is no longer a thing she knows. Find your weapons, would you, and make haste unmatched. I have left her in a loop, and so a pattern for her to recall and forget. In front of you is what our foe wants you to see, and lose what little hope remains. Don’t take any more ‘medicine’, hmm? Look at what it does. Our foes are more deserving of your alchemical genius. It’ll all seam into sense when you arrive at the prison; Panzjrah-piece gave you the location, no? So off and come you go.”
∞
Shay stared darkly at Amneshay, preferring as she had read: “No, I’m going to make it different. We can break the endless loop of this contract.”
“You-two read the skin always, you-two always say nay-be’same. We’re doing our part in the scheme; Fate’ll find these pages, wasting the fabric they have left, and Lay’d Payn’ll be-see a step closer-to.”
It seemed to Shay that Amneshay could not stick to one lineage or allegiance or version of things. Having read more of the contract, she could perhaps understand why this had happened over the untold ages to Amneshay. Next to her younger signatures on the once-wet portions of the contract, were other signatures from the other party. While Shay had sigh-signed in black, Lay’d Payn not only in crimson red had drotted, but in Violet as well under a different name, the two names and titles written repeatedly and overlapping the others: Lord Fate. Lay’d Payn. Lord Payn. Lady Fate, and so on. Lay’d Payn and Lady Fate were the same soul. One life in or on different stages.
∞
“Would you come with me? Just why-try with me. Do you want to see them again?” Shay stood dizzily, having to hold onto the table.
She opened her disguise and threw down what remained of her poisoned medicine, the leather roll reeling open, containers shattering and already-empty. Amneshay abandoned the table and rummaged feverishly across the needling ground through scattered glass reaching for the new syringes.
“Very-merry-much-so, and to take the princes’ hand. And grow our flowers. Gathering Forever’s buds with Serib.” The thing looked at their own rotten wrist. “We just have to wait-eight.” Amneshay changed allegiance back to yet another version of what she thought was going to happen.
Shay fell to the needled floor, coughing against the stench, gripping the darkness and tattered shoulders of Amneshay: “That’s what the enemy wants…” Shay tried. “…you’ve been out-spied and played. Read here, something is wrong with the contract.”
∞
“The over-names?” Amneshay replied without moment enough to look and check. “That’s the loop of it; I always show myself that, didn’t I tell you up-p-age above? I’m showing because you asked.”
Shay quickly looked to the ceiling, unsure what Amneshay meant by above, but we know, don’t we?
“We yore-swore to serve and are bound-around. Lady-Fate and Payn is her own adversary. Who knows when we turned up? With our medicine helping her forget those things and remember these. Timeless bleeds and blurs.”
Shay’s patience at last had faded. “Tell me where our swords are. I’m leaving before you pull me into your infinite insanity.”
∞
Less a person and more a device for plotted schemes beyond in greater seams or dreams, Ameneshay defaulted to yet another version, yet another answer to the same question:
“Oh, I’ve been shown that before. It’s what our enemy wants us to think, to move elsewhere. No, we’re needed here for something. You always take the swords from here because you always leave Serib and Woid there at The Club. In another lineage you do not leave Serib and Woid alone, and tragedy does not arrive. The two tales are vying against one another. This is Fate’s tale we are trapped in, the tale of The Enemy. It ends as it ends.”
∞
“Those tumours in the sky? At the steps...” Shay started looking for the swords herself. Whatever was in the tea had started taking hold of her, alas she kept her vision narrow as a cyclops, doggedly opening this drawer and those, sending the bare wood shelves littering among the needles.
Amenshay spoke always stalking from Shay’s own shadow:
“Those tumours and Boiled Angels, that is Lay’d Payn’s doing-brewing, that is the tayl of The Heir Returned.” Amneshay pulled out a crumpled sheet of old parchment, unable to remember the lines she was supposed to say until:
“Ahem-phlegm! Freedom set out on crusade against Falsehood, it is believed, with a different name: Lillian. Somewhere in the out-there after victory, she changed, and the saviour returns/ed a destroyer. Alas The Great Freedom has their own enemy, Heirown Conscience, the last champion of Courtdom, and she may not prevail.”
Shay took less and less notice, finding sparse ingredients and reagents as she went, allowing instinct to bottle and jar and pouch them, fastening to the harness under her failed disguise, leaving behind what she no longer needed.
∞
Amneshay flickered with the shadowy candle-flames from hope to despair:
“There are those that would-should defer-prefer Time was not murdered, you-see-obviously; a little late for that, but there are scraps and ashes, embers that could yet be salvaged-apparently. They can grip reality, those souls on the other wide-side… we can’t. Ever since a girl we can’t quite, can we? Always looking in shadows against what light is saying as true, believing anything that leads to Else. But what if we changed The Truth?”
∞
Running dizzy and tired from Amneshay, Shay found her parents’ swords. Their blades reeking with rust. She tried picking them up and fell backwards into a floor of needles spiking in her back. This tea smelt the same as her strange memory in the crimson palace, though Amneshay must have added another ingredient or few:
“I told you, you-two didn’t make it in this done-one. Shouldn’t-couldn’t have drunk the tea.”