Raven's Ladder (15 page)

Some of the listeners pressed their hands to their hearts, others to their throats.

“The raggedy boy, he yelped at that piercing sting. And he leapt up so fast he startled his maker. The stranger laughed and hugged the boy, and they danced, each thumpin’ a drum. It weren’t a dance meant for show. It was just a burst of happy and hooray. And them tricksters that watched, they forgot about the contest. For a few forgetful moments, they were accidentally happy as well.

“And then the maker turned to that raggedy girl he’d made, and the boy
got nervous and picked at his stitching. The girl sat up and sang out a song that set her maker to laughing. The tricksters’ smiles, they faded fast, for they were baffled ’n’ vexed. How could inventions surprise their own maker? How could a doll know gratitude or make up a tune?

“This troubled them as the raggedy boy struck sparksticks that flared into light, as he painted his hands many colors and then painted the maker’s as well. The raggedy girl, she touched the tricksters’ faces and spoke a poem. The words she crafted meant many things at once. The tricksters felt she had pulled out their stuffing into the light, and it was muddy with sadness and shame. This scared them, for how could anybody’s puppet know such stuff?

“The girl’s maker touched her shoulder lightly. ‘For your kindness,’ he said, ‘I’ll show you a secret.’”

Krawg suddenly clapped his hands together and laughed.

Warney gasped, struck with a wild notion he had never dared suppose. Old Krawg was making all this up. This wasn’t some old story he’d refashioned his own strange way. No, old Krawg was weaving a tapestry all on his own.

A tang of sweet smoke tainted the air, but Warney gave it no heed as Krawg continued.

“Much to the girl’s surprise, wings unfolded from her shoulders. She took to flitting about, swimming around the stars quick as a fish in the sea. Her maker smiled like an old grandpa at play with his children. He needed no more fancy stuff. The game, you see, was done as a bun left too long in the oven.”

The hostess, interrupting Krawg’s story with a sharp curse, scuffled her way back to the kitchen. “Nectarbread,” somebody muttered.

Krawg would not be distracted. “But the raggedy boy,” he lamented, “well, he’d picked at his stitches too long, and his insides were coming out. ‘Why can’t I fly too?’ he asked. ‘Oh, I’ve got something else special for you,’ said the maker. But that was no good for the boy. ‘Make me fly!’ he cried, and the maker, he breathed a deep one. Then he snapped out a stitch in the boy’s sewn back. Wings sprang out, and skyward he flew. The boy and the girl, they laughed and they danced. But the boy laughed too loudly, and as he swooped low, the tricksters, they noticed a wrinkle, right there between the boy’s brows.

“‘That’s all for today,’ said the maker. But it was clear he’d shown only a spark of his magic. This threw them all mad into fits. All the six tricksters’ cold and cruel inventions did only what they were told. Creatures flown like kites. Machines with wheels that turned. Spells that did as they were designed and never surprised. But who could invent such a creature, with a mind and heart of her own? And all the girl’s ways with words and mystery! What of their devising could imagine such surprises, could say one thing and mean another?

“‘How is it,’ they asked, ‘that you fashion such life? What treasure have you dug up?’”

Krawg leaned forward as if he’d stopped at the edge of a precipice. When he exhaled, it was the sound of a well gone dry.

But then his eyes widened. And he rubbed his hands together as if contemplating a perilous dive.

“The stranger, he smiled without fear. With a fatherly affection, he said, ‘Don’t you have a notion by now? I’ve come to call you home with me. Give up your boasting. Don’t waste more days on thieving. Come back…’” Krawg choked, looking down into his empty hands. “‘Come back home, my friends, and you’ll have all you need. I’ve missed you there. I’ve drawn golden threads of will through hearts like these before. Yours were the first that I threaded.’”

All around the storyteller, rasping shouts of surprise burst out, filthy cries of alarm, like bushpigs growling all through a swamp. Krawg cast Warney a look of nervous glee, an expression Warney hadn’t seen since the heyday of their thievery. Krawg’s reckless gamble was working.

The old man continued with heightening zeal. “And so them tricksters threw tantrums and quakes. They roared like lions with tails caught in traps. They barked like dogs who catch sight of the gorrel. They declared themselves their own inventions and refused to follow this dollmaker anywhere.

“‘I’m taking my children back home,’ said the stranger with a sigh. ‘And I plan to make a thousand more. The parties we’ll have. The feasts we’ll devour. The colors we’ll give to the world.’”

At that, Warney’s mind lit up, and he smiled, for he knew the source of his friend’s inspiration.

Meanwhile, the hostess quietly took new drink orders, glad to have her customers so enraptured. More were pressing in through the door, straining to hear the story and whispering questions to catch what they’d missed.

“One of the six tricksters came forward then, arms folded ’cross his chest, like so. ‘What if I don’t believe that you made us?’ he scoffed. ‘What if these scrap ’n’ stitch children are just illusions? Are two other tricksters in contract with you, hiding in those woven costumes?’

“‘I’ve said all you need to hear,’ said the stranger.

“‘If those wretched toys have untamed minds, they’ll leave you,’ sneered the tallest trickster, the one with the curl to his lip. ‘If you’re smart, you’ll crush those sparks. You should control your inventions like we do.’

“Before he could laugh, that trickster fell back, his very own fireworks exploding in their boxes. The dragons he’d stitched came undone. And while he moaned over the mess, the stranger took his children and disappeared. Victorious.”

Warney surveyed the revelhouse, gazing into the mirrors to study the listeners’ rapt attention.

“So that’s it then!” roared the miner who was waiting for his turn at the contest. He stood up and pounded his mug on the table a little too sharply, and it shattered. The hostess cried out and disqualified the man, which brought the last contestant to his feet.

“You think you’ve heard a tale?” he squeaked, failing to muster the confidence he wanted. “I’ve got a tale of King Helpryn and how he fought an oceandragon and saved our glorious house from—”

“The stranger here isn’t finished!” came a voice. It was the revelhouse guard who had come in from outside and forgotten his duty. “Look! He’s serving up more!”

Krawg stood. And as the hush fell, a voice not his own rose up in his throat, bitter and twisted. It reminded Warney of the Krawg he had known in the days before they found Auralia together—an angrier Krawg, a jealous and spiteful Gatherer.

“The tricksters,” said Krawg, “they pursued the powerful stranger, all jealous with rage. When they found him after years of chase, they were threadbare ’n’ crazy. And when they saw the whole new world he’d made, all
wild with color and life and a whole mess o’ children, they wept and they cursed. ‘What can we do to match such invention?’

“So they made themselves a moon of dust from all their failed attempts throughout the starry vastness. And they crouched down behind it, peering ’n’ plotting how they might assail the stranger’s wondrous world. Behind the moon they molded imitations, all frail ’n’ forgettable, which only made them madder. So they besieged the dollmaker’s inventions and took hold like sucker-worms, throttling every beauty, choking out the pulse of life. They flooded fields he planted. They fouled oceans he spread.

“But they could never quite capture his children, for he protected them, and they followed him, ever refusing to stray.

“In time the stranger grew angry at the tricksters. ‘I’ll raise a fence,’ he told them, ‘one you cannot trespass. We’ll play there out of your sight so we do not offend you anymore.’

“‘Oh,’” said that snarling voice of a Krawg long gone. “‘We will steal your children away,’ the tricksters ranted. ‘We’ll fool them into unstitching themselves. They’ll curse you. There’ll be no more play, only war. Those wills you’ve invented—they’ll abandon your arrogant hands. We’ll overpower them and prove that we are too strong to be mere inventions of yours.’”

Krawg now seemed somber. He massaged his hands as if they ached. Warney knew, somehow, just what he was thinking. All those hard lessons of life as a thief were burning in his memory, scorching the path of his story.

“The maker sighed and said, ‘The more you unstitch what I’ve made, the more you’ll fray and fumble and fail. But there is a golden thread that runs through everything. Should you ever lure my new family into forgetfulness, that golden thread within them will burn with secrets of the weave they were meant for. If even one of my prodigal children traces that thread and follows it through all your snares and illusions, he’ll find his way home. When he does, I’ll give him the power to bring everyone else back with him. Slaves and crooks, kings and queens and heirs to thrones, thieves and killers, youngsters and old folks. He’ll bring ’em back by way of the innermost strand, a thread that can’t be broken. And so I’ll draw all threads back into my weave.”

In the quiet that followed, somebody murmured, “Bet that didn’t make those tricksters too happy.”

“No,” said Krawg. “This only stoked their wrath. ‘If you’re wrong, we get to keep those that leave you,’ said the tallest. ‘And you may not do more to bring them back across your fence.’”

The story seemed to have taken control, and Krawg could not stop himself.

“So the maker took his children behind a great curtain. And the tricksters set about their wicked arts in full view of that shelter.”

A commotion erupted in the revelhouse doorway. Crowds pressed inside to make room for another. But Krawg seemed not to notice, and so the story went into its final chapter.

“Just when the tricksters were weakening, worn-out in their attempt to lure out the children, one young boy—that first raggedy boy that the stranger had sewn—he spun himself out to the edges of things, curious about the tricksters’ displays. He stumbled in his steps for a moment, the wrinkle gone deep in his brow, and gazed at the world beyond the dollmaker’s fence.

“He was troubled to see what the tricksters were doing out there in the moonlight. It bothered him how nothing they did made any music, only trouble ’n’ noise. But the more he looked, the more he got dazzled by the power in their show. He wondered what it would feel like to step out into that silvery light and smash something with a hammer of his own. Surely he could try it and nobody would know.

“Caught there on the boundary, the boy was questioned by his smiling maker. He made an excuse and said the moonlight had drawn him there. ‘But the moon,’ the maker told him, ‘it does not truly shine. It only casts back light that it has stolen from the sun.’

“The raggedy boy was ashamed of his error and even more upset by his lie. How could he have thought of breaking away? But he knew that others had witnessed his distraction, had sensed his rebellious desire. When he returned to his place in the play, word spread that he was forgiven. And he resented that mark in his history. He thought less of himself and feared that his master thought less of him for failing. He did not want to bear that pang of shame alone. So he called for a game of Seek and Go Hiding. And while his master covered his eyes and counted to fourteen, the boy lured all the
younger children to the boundary. And the maker, letting them go, wept behind the hands that covered his face for the counting.

“Seeing their advantage, the tricksters thundered like storms. They burned gardens into deserts. They swept lakes into the sky and brought the water down in storms to flood. They lunged at the children and—”

A sound like a snake’s hiss pierced the quiet all around Krawg. And then a voice slashed through the revelhouse.

“That one.”

The blade of that voice severed the taut lines of attention connecting every listener to Krawg’s story so that each one slumped like an unstrung puppet.

Krawg stood with his hands raised as if trying to catch some mysterious falling light. Then he fell against the table, breathless, sweat streaming down his brow.

The figure who had shouted was hunched in the doorway, for she was too tall to stand upright in the frame. Cloaked in what looked like a red tent, she clasped one grey hand to her beard. That chalky flesh was somehow immune to the tint of golden light.

At first the revelers thought the knifelike nail of the pointing finger was aimed at the trembling storyteller. “How many?” Her words cut their ears. She stalked forward in unsteady strides that suggested she walked in her own personal earthquake.

But she passed Krawg and loomed over a man sitting at a table against the wall. The man, snoring spittle onto the table, had both hands thrust out before him, clutching half-empty mugs among a dozen other empties.

The hostess slowly stood up, clearing her throat. “I told him, Good Seer. I told him if he drank another, he’d suffer the punishment. He knows the rules.”

Panner Xa slowly searched the crowd until her wide eyes, two shining moons, fixed upon a bald and shirtless brute in a black cloth mask. “The rules!” she shrieked.

The brute stood up as if he’d been shouted an order, unsheathed a
gleaming blade, marched straight to the table, and in one clean strike severed the drinker’s left hand. As the guilty drunkard lurched to his feet in surprise, the brute snatched up the hand left on the table. Warney had time to notice the bright runes tattooed on the knuckles before the hand was cast, dripping, across the room and out an open window.

The Seer’s eyes followed that hand, and her crooked lips smacked dryly together.

The drunkard blinked at the blood pump of his newly opened wrist as puddles of beer reddened and spilled off the table’s edges. He coughed three unintelligible announcements, then fell straight into the arms of the brute, who dragged him outside, snatching a torch from its stand on the way through the door. A searing howl, a sizzling sound, and then sobs. The brute returned and planted the torch back in its stand as if this were just part of his routine.