This week, I challenged Cedar Sanderson to explain the woman blowing smoke rings without an obvious mechanism. Leigh Kimmel asked me to explore what happens between the sounds…
In the distance, the tower clock began ringing the song for eleven bells, cutting through the evening darkness. The deep, melodious noise only made her swallow a thin trickle of bile threatening to make her retch. Anya glowered down at the tools in her hands before jabbing the flexible wires into her bun of unruly hair.
“Of course I have everything I need,” she snapped, jerking her head toward the hooded figure seated in the corner of the room. “You taught me, after all.”
The figure was still on a heavy wooden chair, face shrouded, hands knotted and swollen with age.
Anya had always hated this room with no fireplace, where drafts leaked through thin walls. She’d tried to patch the gaps with plaster, but it cracked and dropped off with every change of the seasons. The walls reeked of cabbage and stale sweat, but was all they could afford. The red-faced landlord hadn’t raised their rates since Gruen’s hands became too stiff to work, but it meant she’d become whipcord thin and sleep-deprived trying to make up for a master thief’s skills.
“Magic,” the voice urged, reedy and thin. Gruen’s unkempt beard poked out from under the cowl, grey with yellowed streaks. “You did not succeed in skiving the preventative spell.”
She frowned and stamped her feet to hide her nerves, wiggling her close-fitting leggings and tunic, dark colors mismatched to blend into the night. Anya bent to tighten a bootlace. “I won’t steal from the neighbors,” she muttered to the wooden floor, swept as clean as she could get it.
The chair creaked as Gruen leaned forward, his dusty face emerging from the hood, bulbous nose first. His sour breath wafted directly into her face as she straightened. Long practice kept her from flinching. “That potion Mistress Kira drank yesterday would have kept the tower’s magic from affecting you if you’d gotten to the bottle first. I need this to work, girl.”
“We both do,” Anya replied, and flexed long, thin fingers before pulling on kidskin leather gloves. She’d risked filching them from an affluent halfwit’s belt earlier this week after her practiced eye saw they were exactly her size. They’d help her keep her grip tonight.
She swung a leg up on the windowsill. Gruen’s voice stopped her again. “You must be in by midnight, girl.”
“We’ve gone over the plan several dozen times,” Anya replied, and dropped out of sight. She landed crouched on the roof several feet below, a practiced landing that kept any thumps to the stairwell. That kept from directly annoying the neighbors, who didn’t need to know their neighbors had less than normal jobs.
Clambering over a small wall that served no purpose but to hold a honeysuckle vine and a bird’s nest, Anya took a deep breath in the star-strewn night, away from the stink of the streets. She much preferred transiting the flat rooftops.
She loped her way across the city, thankful most of the buildings were only a few feet apart with each leap. She’d heard a tale from one of the other orphans that some king had mandated the city’s buildings be the same height and color, pale stone that from street level only looked filthy with mud and soot from cooking fires. Anya herself thought the legend was stupid, a ridiculous thing only some rich fool would care about. In her mind, that made it all the more likely to be true.
Her ankles ached with the thirtieth landing, but Anya could see her goal only a few hundred craken away now. The great stone tower loomed over the rest of the city, built from dark speckled stone that contrasted with everything else. It held the bells that rumbled through the city each hour, but was rumored to hold secrets as well. Not just secrets, but magics, too.
Gruen wasn’t getting any younger. She wasn’t sure how much more gratitude his former students would continue to supply. A few gifts to tide them over had been appreciated. This information was significant enough it felt like a final payment, from apprentice to master, a final graduation.
If it were true.
Anya slowed, breath coming harder now, as she reached the final rooftop. Her eyes measured distances and angles in the dark night. The dark tower was further away than her usual jumps between rooftops. Stepping back, she took a running leap and wondered if she was truly mad.
She sailed through the air and seized the arched arrow-slit window with an outstretched arm. Her right side burned with the strain as the rest of her body thumped solidly against the stone. She’d distributed her weight across the stone during impact correctly, like falling forward. There’d been no way to practice the landing, or even the distance. Anya had nearly let go at the shock. She hadn’t anticipated being unable to breathe.
Wheezing, she scrambled through the narrow window with burning lungs. If she had been eating more regularly, she would have been stuck wiggling, waiting spiderlike for the morning guards to see her against the tower. Or worse, exhausted from hanging on, flattened against the ground and buried in Pauper’s Field.
She wasn’t sure even Gruen would mourn her, even though he certainly wouldn’t survive her loss.
She held the thought of Gruen in her mind as she sagged against the stone stairs inside the tower. She may not like him much, but Anya certainly owed him. Why, she’d not even have a trade if it weren’t for him teaching her the thieving craft.
If she could get this potion, his skill would be restored. She was sure of it. He’d be able to teach her so much more. Flexible fingers grown supple with restored youth would train her the things he tried to describe with increasing frustration.
Anya leveraged her body up with one hand pressed against a frozen, glittering stone floor. The granite tower was musty and cold, each step frosted over. This odd speckled stone held the cold more than the pale stone, it seemed. She gazed around with dismay, and realized she’d leave a distinct trail, even in the dim light that strained through the narrow windows.
She bit her lip. The sharp pain from a slightly chipped front tooth brought her focus back, as it always did. She was on a deadline. It didn’t look like guards came here often anyway.
The intel had said to go up from roof height, so she did, taking each stone step with trepidation. She hadn’t thought getting in the narrow window would be quite so difficult, and had planned to exit the same way. She wasn’t sure if a higher level would work to get onto the nearest building’s roof. Would it be too high?
The door with the crescent moon, the former student had whispered. He’d looked over his shoulder as he shared his information a week prior in the grubby apartment, as if worried a guard would come crashing through the battered, barred wooden door.
She paused at the landing and saw the door she sought was painted with a mosaic of patterned, intertwined lines. A crescent moon stood starkly in the middle, opalescent but unadorned. It reflected the starlight, glowing faintly.
Anya waited, heart rapid, hoping no guards would come by on patrol. Gruen’s student had been so certain. Use the noise of the bells to cover the sound of breaking in. Get out with the quarter chime to avoid the guards.
It must be getting close. Time to be ready. She reached up and tugged on the flexible metal wires in her hair. The lockpicks snagged, loosening her bun.
The bell’s song began, high above her, and she felt a few hairs tear free as she yanked the last pick free and dropped to her knees. She could feel the reverberation through the stone, and didn’t like what the intermittent humming did to her fingertips.
The crescent moon on the door began to glow as she and inserted the picks into a star-shaped silver keyhole, leaning against the door. She closed her eyes and refused to look at the sinuous lines. If she didn’t see them moving, it wasn’t happening.
She had only the time of the song, and then until the twelfth bell to get inside. The longest song, the witching hour, the chill tones of mourning for the dead. Midnight was sacred to the stars.
Anya felt a drop of nervous sweat trickle down her forehead as she worked the lock, hands steady and implements sure even as her pulse pounded in her neck. The balance needed to be precise, a light touch only, gentle pressure to ease the lock open like a lover.
The pins of the lock caught, one, two, three, four, desperate moments as the bells’ eeriest song began to close. She raked her pick desperately back and forth, jamming it into the lock as far as she could. Failure was not an option.
With a click, the last pin raised. The lock turned as her hands slid automatically.
The door cracked and she fell inside, eyes opening in startlement. The door’s crescent moon blazed like the sun, shattering the darkness within.
Anya gazed up into a tattooed face with pointed ears and dark green, watchful eyes. Above her in the tower, the bells ended their song and tolled out the hour.
It was not midnight, she realized with horror and confusion. It was the tones of the clock striking three.
