The faint light of day was caught within several droplets that hung upon a window of the Woodcut Tavern.
Gently they fell to the ground, a patter of lazy rain intermixed with the sweep of an ambling wind. It was a quiet kind of morning, one that shimmered with a faintness of firefly fragile dawn. Slowly it exhaled, muted rain fell in wide drops. Circular gusts fussed about over the low lake lands, rain herons extended their paper-white wings and dove into the water in search of food or of reprieve from the low-lying fog.
The Sun does not rise with symphony over Lundra. Blanked by ever-looming clouds, the coming of morning is more of a progression of shades: black to greyscale, grey then to muted colour. The warmth of sunlight is obfuscated to momentary sundogs that burst through the clouds and bless the ground with a golden lace.
A quiet melody played out from the drips of rain that fell from the roof above. It was as if the day was a compass spinning freely upon a map, a direction waiting to be found.
Corrine once again kicked the itchy Garran blankets from her unfamiliar bed and rebelled against the feeling of waking without injury.
They were leaving today. Police officers Corrine and Finn Lawdry were setting off to Sandulk, and needing to drag a dead thief with them who had dragged them three sodden days north of a city that they were usually so reticent to leave.
But Corrine had retired, she reminded herself. Life was simple now, there was no more fighting, there were no more cults. All she had to do was to walk into the Sandulk police station and put her badge down on the table. She could open her bookshop, Corrine mused while searing through her possessions, she could drink tea while cults and madmen alike ran through the streets with axes held aloft.
Picking up her coat, the retired officer ruffled around in its pockets to retrieve her badge, just wanting to feel the familiarity of the over-polished shield that was battered from years of use. Finding a handkerchief, Corrine absently voiced a disgusted “ugh” and tossed it towards the bed, the faintest flash of light catching her eye as the bunched fabric unfurled. The glint then grew as an object became free of the hanky. A disc of stone escaped from the cotton sheet and fell ominously out onto the bed, its centre glowing with a single eye that flickered a red light. Moving closer, Corrine then stumbled to the floor as two stands of thread leapt upward from the stone then intersecting away through the walls of the room. Scrabbling to her feet, the retired police officer made an awkward grab at the stone and scooped it back into the handkerchief, bunching tartan cloth together hastily and pressing a pillow down upon the both for good measure. It was quiet. Exhaling a quick breath, Corrine cursed Lenith for an entire garden’s worth of rotten luck.
This was a problem.
Know by her fellow officers as being pugilistically brash when jumping into a fray, Corrine considered herself to actually be quite measured in the manner in which she jumped.
Fighting was all about the jump. If you start flat footed you’ve only wasted your own time, and whoever it was that you were going to punch will probably get in first. You had to learn why you were jumping, you had to know how you were landing.
And so, Corrine read books.
Her early disdain for the dreary world of non-fiction was countered by a memory that she had long ago left behind. It was just a white shape now, a feeling that propelled her to know more about the world, a duty that didn’t need a dented badge and a uniform.
Somehow becoming the only officer that dealt with cults and the maladies of nature, Corrine had read as much about the arcane as a single bookshop owner could bare to take in. She had seen these stones before, a cult had used these stones for so much evil.
Foiled before the god Sophia was just a lantern in the sky, the Whispering light was an old story that felt more apocryphal than apocalyptic. The group had found a demon trapped in a book*, its stone eyes were taken so that it may have sight, so that its influence could return to the world anew.
The group were disbanded but the story of the stones continued. One drop of blood and they would have sight, one drop and the veins of something ancient would pulse and be connected again.
The kept returning. Like a peat-stack caught aflame, smoke will lick out just as soon as you’d thought it extinguished. Just the other year a group had used the stones and every Lundrian felt as though they were being watched.
‘It’s not my problem.’ said Corrine to the empty room–a lone dust bunny half-asleep on the windowsill feeling a similarly free level of blamelessness.
Snatching the handkerchief from beneath the pillow and quickly folding it amongst the thick Garran blanket, Corrine patted the brown itchy wool and stared off into the middle distance with an air of defeat.
‘This is my problem, isn’t it?’
Corrine suddenly thought of her father, in that wiggling divergence of a memory that arises when a distraction is most unneeded. He was a fellow so engrained into his routine that the garden would be tended no matter how hard the rain fell. He was patient, he had long arguments with clockmakers that were unable to produce a dial that ran by his time, country time. “It can all wait until after breakfast,” he would say in moments unsuited for consideration. The only time that Corrine could remember him missing breakfast was when the river had flooded, and a sheep was carried all the way down to Ennis-Moor: he never had lost a sheep.
A feeling of creeping dread partly abated now that the stone was hidden away from its own sight, Corrine opened the window and swore loudly into the burgeoning morning.
…
‘Stubbed your toe then?’ a voice shouted from the ground below.
A mist had crept up from the lake-lands beyond the tavern and it was hard to see beyond the grass of the tavern’s edge.
Leaning outside and squinting past the fog, Corrine saw her partner pushing an overturned barrel away from the tavern, he kicked against wet gravel and looked to be carrying a shovel over his shoulder.
‘Taking a walk are you, Finn?’ Corrine replied in the Lundrian way.
‘I had a thought that only five pints can gift to a man.’ said Lawdry, unlumbering the shovel and moving below the window so that they could talk without having to shout across the still rurally drowsy morning.
‘I thought to myself, why drag your man there all the way back to Sandulk only to bury him? Why not take a sketch, borrow a shovel, and walk home with nothing heavier than our own smiles. We’ve got his wallet, his shoes, and what he looked like. That’s enough.’
Drumming her fingers on the windowsill, Corrine admired her partner’s logic.
‘You found a cemetery, did you?’
‘Well, no.’ said Lawdry the finer details of his idea still as foggy as the surrounding morning, ‘Markov was happy so long as I didn’t dig on his property–something about holes and Garrans owning more land down than they do across. I thought I’d find somewhere flat and then dig until the hole seemed respectable. After that, we’ve done as much a Dormir could ask.’
‘Actually, do you think that it’s still hiding a body if you put a gravestone by where its buried?’
It can all wait until after breakfast.
Her father’s words once again returning like an echo. Nothing mattered. Corrine was retired-enough to be selective in her duties and whatever Lawdry wanted to burry was his own business.
Closing the window without a reply, Corrine waved at her partner and had almost forgotten the glowing stone that was bundled up in some blankets on top of her bed. Lifting the corner and seeing no streak of red flash from within, Corrine tightly refolded the blanket and stuffed it into a saddlebag that they had managed to retrieve from the broken wagon. Whoever had found the stone knew how it was used. But why did a horse thief have one? Something in Corrine’s gut was troubled by seeing the red glow once again. It was as if an eye had turned to her, a new thread stitched into the tapestry just to encircle her, to watch her.
With a shudder, the retired officer made her way downstairs.
~
‘Shall we head off then?’
In time Finn Lawdry had returned with an empty barrel and once again had managed to track mud across the floor of the Woodcut tavern.
The publican, Markov, had seen the officer leaving with a shovel and decided to roll up all the good carpet on the likely chance that an absent-minded police officer might return with mud on his boots.
The two officers paid for their stay, they bid their farewells, and then they wandered off into the grey morning just happy to be finally on the way home.
It was not as though their home was pleasant. Sandulk was regarded by many as a cold and weathered ghost of a city. A ruin, home to more frustrations than a lifetime of sticking door jambs and wailing windowsills. But from the ruin there was a richness to its moss-covered alleyways.
A forgotten history that rested within stone buildings, ancient trees that grew through cracks, and weathered facades that were held standing by twisting oaks and pine. Time was almost trapped there, Sandulk was left at a confluence of the past and of reclaim nature. It was so easy to see the roots of another city within moss covered city, buildings emerged from the shadow, a skeleton once so well constructed that new life could stand upon its footings. |
In all, there was a tolerable charm to Sandulk’s leaking gutters. A feeling of place that was embodied by the words, good enough.
The city becomes hushed as day gives way to nightfall. A vibrant hue of green lays to rest and the sense of a forlorn traveller washes across the street. Doors close, the once busy roads are left without noise, Sandulk rests quietly.
Drawing a small flame into her palm with dreams of her bookshop, Corrine sighed in relief, seeing the now healthy flame for the first time in weeks. She had been tired; her strength was slow to recover. Closing her fingers into a loose fist the fire grew in the natural column of her hand, a gentle red and orange light wisping up over her thumb.
‘Did you want a smoke?’ Lawdry asked, seeing his partner draw a flame and hold it in what Lundrians had come to know as a smoker’s cradle.
‘No. I’ve given up,’ said Corrine closing her fist tightly and letting the fire sputter out between her fingers, ‘the smoke was just slowing me down.’
A Lundrian could never be burnt by their own flame as it was a simple part of themself. Much like wax, a person gave a fragment of their life to conjure the fire. From a Lundrian’s heart, they saw themself glow within their own flame; they saw the light that blooms from their life, they watch it thrive against the rain.
A Lundrian doesn’t fear the dark like many others do in the world. A Lundrian fears darkness of lost light, they fear losing themselves.
Corrine breathed the open air and felt present for the first time in several years.
It was ok to give up, she decided, shifting the saddle bag on her shoulder, and enjoying the rhythmic trudge of her footfall slowly taking her home. To give up is to give something else a chance to grow, a shoot of heather sprouting from the blackberries.
‘I’ve got one more thing to do,’ she said to Lawdry after a silence, the memory of light from the stone once again weaving two threads out into the distance, two others able to see her face, ‘one more thing to do.’
—
*Demons, while still an annoying part of any librarian’s day, were once a more prevalent inconvenience across the world of Lamplight. Unable to be scared by steel and impermeable to holy water, the knights of the day found it most effective to trap a rampaging horror from beyond the tapestry in a book, or a pamphlet if nothing else was close to hand. This, while being a quick fix to any demonic happenstance, only annoys demon to the point where it will take control of the ink and increase the original text’s font until the book explodes.
A well bound book, it was said during the time, was well worth its weight in gold.
J. McCray
2023
Sunday Short Stories 