“If Arnole had told you he was leaving, would you have gone with him?”
“If it wouldn’t have put him at risk, and if I’d thought it would get me cleanly away from Rashel, I probably would,” she said. “He never told me. He never asked me. I don’t blame him for that if he really thought I couldn’t keep it to myself…”
After a long pause, the female voice said, “It’s irrelevant now, anyhow. Arnole didn’t yell for help until he was threatened with a second Chair. Nobody in a second Chair is really alive, they’re just cautionary examples for the populace. We came to get him in the middle of the night, and he suggested we transfer the link to you.”
“Me?” she asked, surprised. “Me?”
“You. Yes. He said it might be useful to you. But we couldn’t find you, not anywhere. So then he suggested Ayward.”
“I went…out,” she murmured, remembering. “That night, I went out to the wall…”
“Well, you picked a bad night for it,” muttered the woman.
“Ayward never worked out, and when we pulled him out of that pond, he was still going on and on about Rashel betraying him and how he loved her and hated her and had to stay with her…”
“He was besotted with her,” said Dismé bleakly.
The female voice interjected, “Say bewitched and you’ll come closer to the truth. His attachment to her wasn’t natural, even Ayward thought so. We’ve heard rumors…”
“Black magic,” murmured Dismé. “Arnole thought so.”
The male voice said, “That’s nonsense. There’s no such thing. Maybe being besotted simply runs in the family. Your showing up down here might indicate so.”
“I’m not part of his family, and I came because I thought Ayward was lying down here in agony. All this other stuff is just plockutta, and I’m tired of listening to it!”
The voices murmured together. The female voice said, “We’ll leave you to get a bit of rest. You’ll find drinking water and a privy on the other side of the pond.”
Dismé, face flaming, waited until the murmurs and footsteps stopped, then took off the blindfold and laid it on the blanket beside her. She found a rock privy on the far side of the pond, and nearby, hollowed into a pillar, was a basin beneath a spring, the overflow glossing the floor of the cavern. She splashed her face and neck, cooling her anger and embarrassment as she cleaned away the dust of the caverns. A glass pitcher stood amid a clutter of cups on a nearby shelf. When she had slaked her thirst, she went back to the blanket and dug out the bread and cheese she had provisioned herself with.
She felt overcome with weariness. The cavern swayed slightly, and she put a hand to her forehead. Exhaustion was understandable, she thought. There’d been all too little sleep lately. As though on cue, the male voice called from behind the pillars to don the blindfold.
Dismé did so, keeping her balance with some difficulty. Anonymous hands steadied her, and the woman’s voice said, “Don’t worry about getting home. We’ll pick up Owen Toadlast and use his disappearance as an explanation for yours, Dismé.”
“Pick him up…”
“Get him out of Bastion. Ayward asked us to. The boy left Faience this morning, and he won’t object to our help.”
Dismé put her hand to her head, which felt as though it were rocking. “You don’t want me to stay here?”
“No. What we really want, though we have no right to ask, is for you to take Ayward’s place as our contact. You picked a hell of time to go out of the house that night. What was that all about?”
“I just used to go out to a certain place on the wall. For some peace. But there were ouphs that night, a fog of them, like being lost in clouds of sad. And they were all around, I couldn’t get away from them…”
Silence. Then, softly, “What did you say there were?”
What had she said? She couldn’t remember. “Nothings,” she murmured. “Nothings.”
Muttering. Growling. The male voice, “So. You’d be willing to be our eyes and ears.”
“If you do something for me!” The anger had stayed with her, busying itself by making white-hot red-rimmed bore holes through the haze that wrapped her. “I’ll be your eyes and ears, if you’ll get me safely away from Rashel.”
The words took the last of her strength, and Dismé lowered her head into her hands. The dizziness increased, and had now turned into acute nausea. Perhaps it was having gone without sleep. Or all this clambering about.
There was a murmuring again, this time among several voices, one saying, “He thought she’d do well…” and the male voice interrupting, “…don’t think this fear of being killed is quite credible…not sure she’s worth the trouble.”
“Wolf!” said another female voice. “That’s cruel.”
“Well, look at the last ten years of her life! She’s behaved like a dishrag, limp as a dead snake. If she’d told Arnole what she really felt, he could have figured something out, but all she did was mush about! I say before we go to a lot of trouble, she should do something decisive herself, just to prove she can!”
“Wolf has a point,” said the first woman’s voice, close at Dismé’s ear. “We’ll arrange getting you away from Rashel, and then we’ll see. We’ll open some doors for you, but you’ll have to walk through them on your own.”
How dared they! Roarer came out of its lair again, like a red wave, and she felt it rise furiously, trying to find a way through the haze. When it could not, it slowly ebbed away. As it retreated, she followed it, floating after it, finding the place it went, a feeling place that smelled of iron and tasted of tears. In that place she heard an endless series of echoes. Mother. Roger. Father. Arnole.
She moved away, then returned to see if it was still there. It was. A twisted cavern that belonged to her, not only the structure of it but also the beast that snuffled inside it, growling and pressing against the walls to make them creak. She could feel it in there, and now she knew where it was, she could come get it, open the gate for it anytime she needed it.
She felt herself nodding, unable to speak. Oh, let a door be opened. Even a door into a furnace where she could go through and burn away this man’s words, like Rashel’s words, hurtful and unkind. A dishrag. A dead snake. A limp nothing. Like Ayward. Useless. The dizziness faded into a tingling quiet. The woman’s voice said, “We’ve given you a drug, in the drinking water. It won’t hurt you. Just relax.”
Later she heard the woman’s voice saying: “Arnole was almost always right. He would say he was sure about something, and it always came true. Then there’s the matter of the light…”
“She probably had a candle or something!”
“We found the lantern two-thirds of the way back, Wolf. We found no evidence of a candle. How did she get here in the dark?”
Something alive was thrust into Dismé’s ear where it drilled its way into her head with hard, pincher feet. Before she could complain about the pain, it was replaced by momentary euphoria.
Another time she opened her eyes to see several figures walking away from her, silhouetted against a distant light. They had horns, bull’s horns, curved like a lyre.
“Demons,” she said, from a dry mouth. “Demons with horns.”
“Nonsense,” said the woman’s voice. “They aren’t horns. They’re Dantisfan. We need Dantisfan down here. No matter, don’t ask. Hush. Drink this. Now look at this and tell me what it is, silently. Now think these words: Courage. Determination. Help. Think louder, in color, the letters H E L P, with jagged points around them! Help! Yes. That’s very good.”
“What I worry about,” Dismé said, in a reasonable voice, “is those shots of Holy Truth they give us. I don’t know how Arnole or Ayward kept quiet about all this, but I can’t…”
“Hush,” said the woman, again. “With a dobsi in your head, their drugs can’t even touch you.”
Later, someone said, “We’ll arrange the opportunity, but you’ll have to be resolute. Wolf’s right. You’ll have to prove you’re worth our e
ffort. Another like Ayward would be useless.”
The words resonated, humming, like a tuning fork. Oppoooor tuuuunity. Rezz ohhhh looot. Dismé grasped those words and hung onto them, though all else left her mind. She was inside a bell that went on ringing without ever being struck, a deep, harmonic reverberation, endless as time. She had drunk something very pleasant, and the sound had begun, fading very gradually into a quiet and welcome darkness.
30
dismé and the doctor
Dismé awoke in her room in the house at Faience, amid a circle of variously concerned, worried, or suspicious faces.
“What happened,” Rashel asked, her eyes narrowed. “What happened to you, Dismé?”
Dismé asked, “Why are you all here in my room?”
Rashel snarled, “You were missing, Dismé. For two nights! Your window was broken. We brought in dogs. They couldn’t find you anywhere. Then this morning, one of the restorers found you lying beside the road, right in plain sight.”
“Morning?” she turned her head, seeing darkness outside.
Gayla said, “It’s night, now. The doctor says you’ve been…drugged. What happened to you?”
Dismé shook her head slowly, not wanting to agitate it in any way. Her brain felt full of…air.
She murmured, “I can’t remember…”
She didn’t remember! There was nothing recent in her mind! Every room in her brain had space in it, the windows were open and the breeze was coming in. How interesting! She did not remark on it, however. There was no reason to invite others into this emptiness. No matter who asked her what, she couldn’t remember anything about Ayward or herself or Owen during the last few days. Instead, she complained of headache, tried to get on her feet and was promptly sick, which effectively ended the questions. She slept deeply, restfully, and they let her alone.
Four days later, the agents from BHE arrived to question her about the strange occurrence. The examination took a good part of an afternoon. Though they kept at it, the usual shot of Holy Truth elicited nothing at all. In the end, the agents reported that she had been abducted and drugged by Owen, the same drugs he used in Ayward’s Chair. Loss of memory from Chair sedatives was not unknown. Dismé was judged to be an innocent victim, luckily unharmed and also untainted by demonish ideas or feelings.
The senior agent reported first to Rashel. “This is a most unusual event, Madam. Your poor sister does seem to have been at the margin of a great many unusual events recently.”
“My sister will get over it,” said Rashel, as she had said before, though with a tone that presaged no good for Dismé. “I am sure she will be untroubled by further events of any kind.”
Dismé was listening as usual—the emptiness of her mind had done nothing to moderate her habits—and she reacted to Rashel’s words as to imminent peril. On the following morning she decided to follow Arnole’s longtime advice and leave, as soon as possible. That same morning, Aunt Gayla whispered to Dismé that considering Rashel’s moods, she had decided to move to Newland to live with Genna, and Dismé agreed this was a very good idea. Privately, she felt it solved her problem as well, and she planned to go with Gayla.
Before any further plans could be made, however, a rider brought an official letter from Hold advising her she had a morning appointment in two days’ time with Colonel Doctor Jens Ladislav, to interview for a job with the Division of Health, Bureau of Happiness and Enlightenment. It was almost the answer to a prayer, an honest reason for departing, one so official that even Rashel would be unable to subvert it! Carelessly, on purpose, Dismé left the letter where Rashel would see it.
“What have you done?” Rashel screamed at her. “How dare you apply for a job in Hold! With Gayla leaving, I need you here to help with the house!”
Dismé heard herself saying, “Rashel, I have neither applied for a job in Hold nor am I interested in housekeeping for you.”
Rachel’s mouth dropped open, for a long moment silent, then furious with accusation: “You’re not what? Since when did you have the wits to decide what you’re interested in?”
Dismé gave her a level look. “Now that Gayla is leaving and Arnole and Ayward are gone, there is nothing to keep me here. This appointment might be interesting.”
Rashel laughed, mockingly. “Once the Colonel Doctor has seen you, he won’t want you. I can’t imagine why he wrote.”
“Nor can I.”
“You didn’t send some kind of application?”
“I wouldn’t have known who to send it to. Surely you’re not suggesting I should refuse to comply with their letter? If you are, I will have to tell them that I am willing to come to Hold, as they have requested, but you won’t allow me to do so.”
She fell silent, wondering at herself. Where had she found the courage to say that? Rashel was actually gnawing her lip in frustration, probably trying to come up with a dear, dear friend in the Division of Health whom she might prevail upon to cancel the request. Jens Ladislav was a colonel, however. He outranked all of Rashel’s dear, dear friends.
In the end, Rashel merely sneered. “No, but when you return, we’ll get to the bottom of this, believe me!”
Dismé had already decided not to return, and the threat in Rashel’s voice buttressed her decision. She would go, and she would stay gone, whether the interview came to anything or not. Remembering Arnole’s frustration with her inaction, she told herself it was the memory of Arnole that moved her, that and the money he had given her to make it possible.
Rashel did not make it easy. She was constantly in and out of Dismé’s room, giving advice on what clothes to take (the ugliest) and where to stay in Hold (the cheapest). She counted Dismé’s coins to be sure the amount would not suffice for more than “a day or two.” Dismé complied with every suggestion. She opened one small case on the foot of her bed and packed it with exactly what Rashel suggested. She left her purse lying open beside it. That night, however, when everyone else was asleep, she obtained several small canvas sacks from the storeroom, packed them with everything else she owned, and dropped them out her window. She then went down the trellis and carried the bags to a seldom-used toolshed near the front gates.
The next morning, as the time for departure approached, she changed into her ugliest clothes, picked up her small case, and found her door had been locked from the outside. Gritting her teeth, she went out the window and down the trellis, in through the back door, up the back stairs, unlocked the door—leaving the key in it—picked up the case, then went sedately down the front stairs when she heard the carriage drive up. The front door was open and Rashel was nowhere in evidence, though as soon as Dismé started out the door, Rashel came around the corner, calling:
“You can unhitch the horses, Michael. Dismé won’t…”
Rashel saw Dismé and stopped, flushing an ugly color.
Pretending she hadn’t heard, Dismé called to Michael. “My door was stuck and I had to jiggle it forever before it opened.”
Michael got down from the seat to open the carriage door. Rashel, her face flaming, moved swiftly forward to take hold of the case, noting its lightness.
“Let me get that for you,” she said, putting it into the carriage. “You only have money enough for a day or two, so don’t delay returning.” She showed a forced smile. “If they should offer you a job in Hold, we’ll have a celebration when you come back to get your things.”
“Oh, Rashel,” cried Dismé, with spurious joy. “How very thoughtful and kind of you. May we have a cake?”
“Oh, a cake, certainly,” said Rashel. “Mrs. Stemfall has a special icing she’s been dying to try.”
“What was all that about?” asked Michael, when they had rounded the first curve.
“She locked me in. Decided I should miss the appointment, I guess. Can you stop at the toolshed near the gate?”
He didn’t ask why, but he followed her to the shed and helped her pick up and stow her remaining baggage.
“You planned this,” h
e said, amazed. “You’ve packed everything, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” she conceded. “Something told me it was a good time to get away. You won’t tell on me, will you Michael?”
“Why would I?” he asked, peering intently into her eyes.
“No reason. It’s just, I’ve left nothing behind to come back for, but I don’t want Rashel to know that until I’m safely situated somewhere else.”
“You left nothing, Dismé?”
“Nothing,” she said, shaking her head. She had a little box containing seeds from her garden. The sacks contained books, her own notebooks, and the rest of her underclothes and shoes, which didn’t amount to much. She did not see the disappointment on Michael’s face, or the hurt in his eyes even as she wondered what else could there have been.
“I took five canvas sacks from the storeroom. I’ll send them back!” she remarked, puzzled.
“Don’t trouble yourself,” he said, rather distantly. “There’s a hundred more in the shed. No one counts them.”
The drive to Apocanew was completed in virtual silence. In the town, he took her to the station and helped her transfer her baggage to the county-train that went back and forth between Apocanew and Hold, up the hill to Hold on one day, down the hill to Apocanew the next. Similar little trains ran between Hold and the other two counties.
Michael said suddenly, “How can you be back day after tomorrow. The train comes from Hold every other day.”
“Yes,” she said. “I know. Rashel knows, too, but she wasn’t thinking. Tomorrow, tell Rashel I thought of it just now, and mentioned it to you. Please tell her you lent me enough money for an extra day. No, no.” She stopped his reaching for his money. “I have enough, she just doesn’t know that. Also, it might help to say I asked you to fix my door before I got back.”
“It’ll give you an extra day before she knows, but she’ll still have a fit.”
Dismé only smiled, her eyes lighting up at the thought. Michael took her by the hand, kissed her chastely on the forehead before she could object, and watched her board the train. As it pulled slowly away, Dismé leaned from the window and called something to him. Was it, “I will miss you, Michael?” He wasn’t absolutely sure, but his step was jauntier as he returned to the carriage.