The sun wearily shuffles across a Lundrian morning both haggard and uncaffeinated.
It arrives without lustre, a faint glow still adorned by the pyjamas of a rolling cloud-line. Filtered light then greets the day with a yawn, settling dew drips down from the moss-covered peaks and onto the rolling hills, onto the emerald green grass of the fields. Gravity, in circumspect, breathes steadily for a moment and the shimmering ground takes on a feeling of lightness.
Movement swells in this daybreak, the current of a low-flung breeze pulls lowly across the earth and then leaps upwards towards a rolling storm-front. Coin-wide droplets of rain fall with a wide berth and grow more condensed as the clouds thicken.
Noise, the percussion of rain.
Woken by the drumming patter of a thatch-lined roof, Corinne opened her eyes and spent a blissful moment without the agony of her last three days rising to greet her.
She had been a police officer yesterday; the battered Lundrian had been a police officer for over twenty-five years, and every day she was feeling as if the effects of careening headfirst into a bog were compounding. There were Horse thieves yesterday; Corinne had out-punched and out-swam the two of them with a smile, she always had. But it was within the grim reality of using a bucket to wash the clumps of peat from her hair that she had finally decided that it was time to retire.
Raising her head, the world-weary Corinne ran through her morning routine of guessing what would be in least agony for a moment and then establishing if consciousness was really worth a try. It wasn’t too bad, she considered with the genuine suspicion of a delayed hangover. Sure, there was a holistically general ache that was taking place across her entire body, and sure, it felt as if her every bone has been accidentally turned around backwards, but there was nothing that felt broken. Foregoing caution and swinging upright, Corinne felt the room over-tilt in an unwarranted reorientation of perspective and barely managed to fight down an urge to be sick the carpet.
Carpet…a rather nice carpet.
Now that was odd.
Drenched by a rain that had fallen long before the invention of a roof, carpeted rooms were still considered quite an acquired taste in Lundra–as anyone who had seen damp find its way into the floorboards could tell you, there was no telling what arcane horrors may lurk below a woven floor cover.
It was a faded kind of red that Corrine imagined to be striking when it was first dyed, criss-crossing rectangles were lain out in an over complicated form of Solitaire. She quite liked it, despite the confusion of its existence.
It was a very a Garran thing to have a carpet*. The trendier cafes of Sandulk had been hanging similar things to their walls as if they were tapestries, albeit ones without story or meaning.
Corinne often worried about her home, every day it seemed as if more art was being absent mindedly sloshed up on its walls and every good library was turning into a place to that served coffee. She felt as though everyone was just busying themselves, drawing when they could be writing. A mural could say something, yes. But a book had the trick of teaching you why you should learn anything at all.
Finding the courage to stumble into the tavern’s bar room, the weary Corinne was surprised to see a stout Garran man, standing beside a hearth and singing in the angular manner of his homeland. She had read somewhere that there was a prolific amount of runesmiths in Gara, and from her first encounter with their language she realised that it sounded like exactly how it was written: with a chisel.
‘You’re happy then?’ she asked–a blank question being as useful as a “hello” in Lundra.
‘Oh, and you seem to be awake.’ said the man with a flowing Lundrian brogue–albeit one that still held the deep THUNK of a Garran wood axe when clapped against the side of a tree.
Moving nearer to the warmth of the glowing hearth, Corrine noted that the man held a windswept kind of appearance to his demeanour: grey hair, wild and living without fear of a brush; mottled clothes that knew as little of ironing as they did of botany. As he turned to fully face her, Corrine was surprised to see a warmth in the man’s face that was more suited in a picture book than it was painted on a person who could be mistaken for an eroded statue. Smiling through a beard that was nearly as dense as thatch, the barman placed a kettle upon the hearth and wiped the soot from his nose with a towel.
‘You’d be the one of the officers, I see.’
‘I was, retired last night.’ Corinne replied with lightened shoulders. She rolled the word “retired” around for a moment. “Quit”, sounded better, “opened a bookshop” was better again.
‘Is something the matter though? I still do have a badge.’
‘Not a matter really, just an inconvenience,’ said the barman, ‘there’s a spot of lost property to report, but I’m sure that the owner will pick them up in their own time.’
Pointing down to a trail of mud that connected the tavern door to a table that Corrine had given patronage to, the retired officer was heartbroken to notice that the trail suspiciously hid beneath a pair of discarded boots that were definitely hers. The man blinked slowly. Corinne bowed her head in guilty acceptance.
It was a tidy inn. A low-slung roof led to a natural desire to sit down; sturdy wooden beams crossed below the ceiling in every defence against the unlikely chance of an avalanche in an open field. Its every edge was chamfered, its every wooden surface was shimmering with polish. There was something mathematical about the tavern, the corners were exact corners rather than just a thing that happened between the sides, the flats were flat in a way that could make a windless lake embarrassed. A large carpet of similar design to the one in her room was stretched across the floor and Corinne thanked every god she could name that her mud trail had missed it.
‘My name is Markov, in case you were wondering.’ said barman as if to fill the silence of Corinne’s embarrassment, ‘My youngest had said that two police officers had bundled in last night, so she had given them a room.’
Folding his arms, Corrine now noticed that there was a carpenter square tucked into the tavern-keeper’s apron that could have doubled as a froe if the application interested him. He had something dusty about his appearance that gave even the floorboards the impression that the man had grown up as a carpenter.
‘No bother though,’ he continued, ‘we’ve all brought in the weather at one point in our lives. You and your man can help clean up whenever he gets back.’
‘Gets back?’
With a timing usually reserved for misfortune, there was a sudden clatter from the tavern’s veranda as if someone had dopped a bag of wet potatoes to the floor without ceremony.
~
Finn Lawdry lay slumped against a wall of the tavern and patted at the shoulder of the dead man beside him.
‘You’re stone heavy, you know that?’ he said, ‘when you eat rocks you sink to the bottom, my ma would always say that to me. No clue what it meant, mind.’
Lamenting the unhelpfulness of the term dead weight, Lawdry had abandoned his usually sound common sense and had wandered into a peat bog under the guise of unstitching a loose thread that had bothered him through the night.
“You’ve got no hope of seeing a lie, but you’re smart enough to know when things don’t add up” Corinne had opined while they were waiting for the rain to slacken one afternoon with little to do, “don’t let reason get in the way of what you feel in the guts. Action, reaction.”
He did like his commanding officer. She was as dogged an officer that he had come across and she was always prepared to take a risk no matter the detriment. Corinne was nice, maybe even kind. Lawdry paused after that thought and wondered if he really did have a concussion.
‘What are you doing? By sure Finn, you’ve gone mad then?’ Corrine barked as she limped from the tavern with Markov in tow.
The tavernkeeper took one look at the thick trail of mud that his second guest had dragged across his veranda and marched off to find a mop, muttering something in Garran that contained a hostile amount of vowels.
‘Corrine!’ replied Lawdry, leaning to attention and guiltily hiding his mud-covered hands behind his mud covered back. ‘You were having a bit of a lie in, so I went for a swim and trawled after your man here. The second lad might have found a way to sneak off though.’
He was a sorry sight. Two eyes beamed forlornly from behind the mud like two hardbacks left in a dollar book bin. His uniform was ruined, and he probably would be picking dirt from places both polite and impolite for years to come.
‘You’re a fool if I’ve ever saw one. Why would you jump into a bog for a dead man?’
Corinne had leapt into larger bogs for less gain, but she felt that the point was worth questioning.
‘Look, the line between a good decision and a bad one is a blur of well-meaning in my family. Anyway, your man hid something in his coat before you started with your boxing, so I got to wondering what it was. I saw his eyes, you know; like a child hiding something he shouldn’t have, all panic and thumbs.’
‘But you look a fair mess, Finn. I would have thought that you could have left some of the bog back in the field.’
Corrine patted her friend on his shoulder and began to search through the dead man’s saturated coat, she was retired but nothing in her constitution would suffer a thief who thought they were clever.
‘This is an arbitrarily flat hill, Corinne, and I’ll not die on it. There’s always a positive. And yes, that means there are negatives too, but think of the linings, sliver things, you know, clouds.’
‘I think our clouds are closer to being lead-lined, Lawdry.’
Retrieving a dark circle from the man’s coat, Corinne knew what the man had concealed before she could withdraw it from his pocket.
Cults annoyed her. There were good ones, well, not good in a world ending sense, more good in a civically organised way. Ones with wide eyes, smiles with too many teeth. Sandulk was kept fairly clean, but it only took one person to start chanting and a good-will group would become a cult. There were the bad ones too. Real cults that drew on the floor with chalk and got all hot and bothered when they thought of a young lass while standing too close to a knife.
A real one used to use discs like these.     Â
Holding grimly onto the flat stone, Corrine stared into the runic eye of its centre and bundled the evil thing into a handkerchief with disgust.
The Whispering Light, she had read about them disbanding the other year and felt the streets to be happier as a result. They carried these stones. Just a touch of blood and the eye in its centre would gain sight, something gained sight anyway.
If the Whispering Light were back, there was trouble coming.
~
In a small lane of a cobblestoned Sandulk street, a used bookshop sat between a tavern and a candlemaker’s. At this store’s front there was a window display busily stacked with novels that passers-by would no doubt hope to one day buy. Behind this window, a neatly painted “Closed” sign fell to the floor, its string no longer able carry the burden of dust that had built up over the years of undisturbed hanging.
Two shadows loomed malevolently within.
‘I told you it was abandoned.’ said one figure in the darkness.
‘But why are there still books here?’ the other replied, whispering nervously and trying to avoid the judging gaze of the non-fiction section. There was truth in those books, the non-fiction section saw through the lies of fairy tales and usually ended with the dragon eating the princess. The second shadow hated those books.
‘Who would steal a book? They’ve just got words in,’ the first shadow argued without fear of being heard, ‘I’ve walked past this place for five years and its never opened. I tell you, prime spot for a lair. Look, there’s even candles.’ Drawing a small flame into its palm, the first shadow burst into a pattern of colour and then dripped hot wax onto its fingers.
‘Ow! Bugger it, wick trimming cheap sakes.’ Shaking its pained hand, the first shadow stomped on the spot and threw the candle onto the floor, cursing the somehow defective pillar of wax.
‘Don’t tip it, Mickey.’ said the second shadow, ‘you always burn your fingers.’ Carefully drawing a much smaller flame into its hand, the second shadow picked up the embattled candle and gently placed the ember onto the tip of its wick nearly as if lowering a newborn into its cot. The light flickered and then steadily took from the wax.
‘No names! No names, you never know who could be listening.’
‘But then the shop wouldn’t be abandoned, Mickey.’
The second shadow, who was now a tall and scruffy fellow by the name of Colin, dropped the ember onto a few more candles and looked around the store in the building light.
‘It lovely,’ he said, looking about the overcrowded shelves with a keen reader’s interest, ‘there’s more books here than in the Rathney library.’
‘Just announce all our plans why don’t you, Colin!’ said the first shadow, Mickey, now slinking back into the darkness and resuming his anonymity, ‘Quit with your talking and help me look around.’
He was a simple soul, Colin. If it weren’t for Mickey the fool would have been drafted into some kind of muckraking gang back in Rathney and wouldn’t be involved with the clean-handed crimes that they were involved in now. That’s what Mickey enjoyed, clean hands. He didn’t care for things like cutting purse strings or pockets and believed that there was a much better gain from people cutting the fabric themselves.
All this cult-botheration Whispering Light stuff was nonsense. Mickey knew that the leader was rich and behind every rich ponce there was a barely locked door with a big bag of money behind it. All he needed to do was to prove that he was indispensable and then find the key.
‘I found a key!’ said Colin merrily from another room, his magpie love of shininess proving to be once again beneficial.
‘It’s in a lock.’
In the dim glow of the fiction section Mickey thought to himself for a moment, what could a bookshop need to keep locked but not locked enough that the key could be left in the lock. His mind, as it always did, replied with only one word: money.
—
*Gara, a country so mountainous that its gullies were considered to be inverted peaks, had taken to artisanal tradesmanship with the gusto of very excitable bloodline. You were born into your work in Gara. Carpet weavers wove carpets, blacksmiths beat metal, and most farmers got quite good at letting a plough fall downhill.
As with all skills, failure was a good marker of whether you would try them again. But in Gara it was more a matter of if you could.
J. McCray
2023
Sunday Short Stories 