The following is my creative submission for the second packet exchange with my mentor. This is a revised edition of the original post. There are substantial differences, also the first scene has been expanded and I've added a second scene. I have a third scene for this segment but that is still in the works. I'm going to go ahead and rate this M, for Mature. Please read with discretion.
“Someone to Kill”
“I didn’t think I would need to
practice this part.” The boy raised an
eyebrow at his mentor. “I’ve been
killing since I was ten.”
“No. You have not.” Roy Kim came around behind the boy and set a
thick cloak about his shoulders.
“Yes, I
have.”
“No,
what you did in the Arène was fighting.
It was surviving. Today, however,
you will be killing.”
With a
groan, the boy pulled the cloak tight about him insulating himself from the
bitter chill he knew awaited them outside in the night. He wiped his nose with his sleeve and
muttered, “I don’t see the difference.”
“It’s
not something you can see. But you’ll feel it.” Roy Kim opened the door
and gestured for his pupil to go first but the boy stepped back. Something about the dark still unsettled him. His mentor frowned, opened his mouth then
closed it without saying anything. There
was nothing to say. Roy pulled his own
cloak tight about his chest and took off without looking back. The boy, of course, charged after him.
Frozen patches of snow crunched
under their feet as they marched to the dungeons. The boy sniffled and wiped his nose again. Every little noise seemed enlarged. His nostrils whistled his existence into the
darkness with more effrontery than even his footfalls. He shivered.
He didn’t want the dark to know he was there. Opening his mouth wide, he breathed silently,
puffing out wisps of fog from lungs that felt half their regular size. When
they reached the dungeon, he resisted an impulse to reach out and grab hold of
Roy Kim’s cloak. Somewhere above them a
cloud shifted and let out the moon. In
the silver glow, they descended together, and yet alone, down the stone and
mortar steps, polished by decades of heavy tread.
About ground, North City was
modern and convenient – civilized. It
hummed with the pulse of electricity, mildly in some places and fiercely in
others. Down below, however, in this
pit, nothing spoke of civilization, no fluorescent flickering, no sweet smells
from bottles or ovens, no electrical humming.
Here it was all candles and screams.
“Well look who showed up after
all?” The Keeper met them at the bottom
of the stairs. He carried a candle in a
silver holder with scalloped edges, the kind used in the Luminary’s
household. The tiny flame cast a faint
yellow glow on the Keeper’s apron. Dark
brown smears covered the fabric. It
might have been blood, but in the dimness it looked like shit. He smiled at Roy, “I was starting to think
you weren’t coming.”
“I told you not to expect us
until after dark.”
The Keeper picked at his beard,
pulling chunks of something from the tangled hair. “Well, it’s been dark for a while now. I got plans for the night so you better make
it quick.” He snorted wetly and turned
away from them, the bulk of his body blotting out all light from the
candle.
What sort of plans could a man
like him have? The boy decided he didn’t
want to know.
Along the wall was a table
smeared with gore, a torture altar, which the Keeper had yet to clean. The boy squinted to see it. Large square grates in the ceiling let in
enough moonlight to soften the darkness, but not enough for him to identify
anything.
Though the boy had never
witnessed the Keeper at work, he knew the vibration of pain and had felt it
coming from this place many times. Right
now, the dungeon was quiet and still, but echoes were often quiet, repeating
infinitely into nothing and yet never really disappearing. All the echoes of his life seemed to converge
in this place and they summoned cold sweat from his brow. He reached up to his chest and felt the bumps
where the beads of his mother’s rosary rested beneath his clothes. When he’d been very young, he used to lay in
bed beside his mother and worry the pewter crucifix between his tiny fingers
until whatever imaginary monsters were chasing him let him be. The habit had stuck. Over the years, he’d rubbed Christ off the
cross.
“Where’s your assistant?” Roy
Kim asked.
“I lent her out to a couple of
Her Ladyship’s guards.” He had a
pleased, conspiratorial air about him.
“But she’ll be back right quick, I bet.
Those boys never last long.”
“Did they pay you?”
“You better believe it.”
“I see.” Roy Kim cleared his throat. “Then maybe you could afford to burn a few
more candles. I can’t see a damn thing
down here.”
“It ain’t my fault you’re going
blind, old man,” the Keeper said. “One candle’s more than enough for a walk-through. It’s all I ever use. Even when I’m cutting. Makes it better, I think. Helps with the imagination.”
“I’m not questioning your
methods,” said Roy Kim, “but this place is a mess and I don’t want to slip on
someone’s tongue.”
The Keeper tsked. “Normally I’d take offense to that, but I
guess since my girl ain’t been in to clean yet, you really could slip on a
tongue.” He laughed like broken bellows.
“Ah, Christ, Roy. Come here, I got something better than
candles.”
The boy ignored them and stared
at the table. He tried to imagine what
parts of who had been cut off. And
why? Had they struggled? Where were they now? Back in a cell? Bleeding out in a corner somewhere, choking
on the leftover stub of their tongue?
Would he be killing that person tonight?
He moved closer. The gore was a
comfort. It was familiar. He’d never been down here before but the
potential for violence made it feel like home.
The dungeon was the Arène sans hope.
Bloody straw for a carpet, steel bars and rusted hinges, the blemish of
slipshod construction and the perfume of human waste, blood,
decomposition.
Roy Kim lit a fire lantern and,
as the room came into focus, the boy took note of several slender icicles
dangling from the steel mesh above them.
Like teeth aching to bite down, they pointed at the cells, thirsting for
the blood of the condemned. They were
stained red in the firelight. It didn’t
feel like home anymore.
“You
know what we’re here for. Get to it.”
Roy Kim hung the lantern on a hook in the wall.
Whether the hook had been placed there for this purpose or for something
worse, the boy did not know.
“It’s
freezing down here,” he said.
“Then choose quickly.”
The boy let out a long sigh and
stepped up to a cell. At first he
couldn’t see anything beyond the smattering of rags that somehow formed a
quilt, but then he perceived the faint outlines of a body – slender, all but
sexless – and the wiry, tell-tale tresses of a female’s hair. White, trembling fingers tugged the tattered
blanket higher and higher until she’d covered her face. A weird tingle surged through him, pricked
his ears like needles. She was just a
little girl. Or the lantern was playing
a trick on him.
“Choose.”
“I
will.” He walked along, peeking through
the bars of various cells. While he
hadn’t taken much note of it with the little girl, he saw now that all of the
prisoners were naked. It seemed cruel to
keep them that way, especially during winter, and it reminded him of the
Arène. He remembered how the Herdsmen
had systematically stripped him of everything that made him human, starting
with his clothes. He guessed that the
dungeon operated under similar principles.
Sucking in his bottom lip, he bit down.
The prisoners had blankets at least, but these thin shreds did not make
them any less naked in his eyes.
His pupils had dilated to match
the flame and, no matter where he looked, he saw the shapes of arms, legs,
hips, and breasts, each piece adding up to something whole, alluring and
frightening. For a moment he forgot Roy
Kim. Forgot the icicles. Forgot to breathe. So many women, all of them prone, curling in
on themselves, shivering and seeming to shrink under his gaze. A few were asleep, but they might have been
dead for all the boy knew. In one of
the cells, two women held each other, one crying and one soothing. The crying one’s body shook with the passion
of her pain and it was terribly attractive.
He paused to watch them, captivated by their intimacy. On impulse, he lowered himself to one knee
and reached in past the bars until his fingers brushed against a frayed
hem. He gave a gentle tug and the
blanket fell away. He stiffened. He knew nothing of these delicate creatures
before him. Not even the color of their
blood. Their skin was so pale, even
under the glow of the lantern, that it didn’t seem possible for red to lie
beneath.
“Oh, ho,
look at this. He’s a kid after my own
heart, Roy.” The Keeper laughed and set a hoary hand on the boy’s head. “Go ahead and look all you want. It’s one of the perks of the job.” Leaning down, he ruffled the boy’s hair and
said into his ear, “They’ll all be
naked when they get to you, little Death Man.”
His guts
churned. It hurt when he stood up, hurt
like he had to pee. He wanted to escape
but Roy Kim caught hold of him.
“I take it you’ve made your
decision.” His mentor squeezed his
shoulder hard. It was just enough to
bring him back from the shadowy clefts of the woman’s shoulder blades.
“I’m still looking.” He shrugged away from his mentor and continued
down the corridor until the lantern light became an echo and darkness returned
to obscure the outlines of breasts and devour provocative shadows. Later he would wonder why so many of the
prisoners of North City were women and he would punish himself for the things
he had felt while looking at them.
He didn’t see any boys in the
dungeon, which was too bad. He supposed
they were still in the Arène. Dying
without any help from him. The few men
he saw along the way were old and beaten down, unthinkable to kill. Yet he would certainly kill any one of them
before killing a woman.
Finally he came upon a male
prisoner who possessed an air of life, something substantial that the boy could
snuff out. The man sat cross-legged at
the back of his cell with his blanket draped over him like a cloak. As the boy drew nearer, the man rolled his
muscle swollen shoulders, dropping the blanket, revealing a powerful thickness
that the dungeon had yet to extinguish.
Cloaked only in shadow now, the man seemed gigantic, his neck like a
knotted bundle of sticks, his body like an animal’s covered in thick patches of
hair which shone golden even in the darkness.
He watched the boy and bristled.
Pick me, his eyes said. Pick me
and I’ll make you bleed before the end.
It was exactly what the boy wanted.
He stood before the cell and gripped the freezing bars.
“This one.”
“Not him,” Roy Kim said.
The
boy’s warm flesh made an awful sound when he ripped his fingers from the steel
and turned to face his mentor. “But you
told me to pick someone.” From somewhere
in the shadows, the Keeper laughed.
“Yes,”
Roy Kim said. “Someone to kill. Not to fight.
You’re going about this all wrong.”
He frowned and ran a single calloused fingertip over his left
eyebrow. It more like a nervous tic than
a ritual of grooming. He probably didn’t
even realize he was doing it. When the
man looked at his pupil again, the limitless wisdom within his black irises
swallowed the boy and left no room for understanding. The boy was used to it. This world was too dark for some kinds of
knowledge.
“This
was your idea in the first place.” He
pressed his hands together, rubbing them, warming them. He glanced in at the prisoner and saw an
expression of disappointment on the man’s face.
A silent promise had been made between them and now it lay broken for
reasons neither of them understood.
Stalking along the cells, the boy searched for a sacrifice to appease
his mentor, but he was Cain, never Abel, and the only thing he had to offer was
rotting fruit.
“Him,” he said at last and
pointed to a male not much older than himself.
At first glance it had been difficult to tell the sex of the shivering
thing in the corner, but the hair was short and the limbs were long. It was too gangly to be a girl. And too sickly to put up a challenge. Filthy bangs hid most of the thing’s pale
face. A single red rimmed eye looked out
from the matted locks, and it conveyed no resistance. Just fear.
Surely Roy Kim could see that.
“You
really don’t get the point of this,” his mentor sighed.
“Why? What’s wrong with this one?”
“Yes,
yes, what’s wrong with this one?” the
Keeper asked.
“Look at
him.” Roy Kim gripped his pupil’s arm
and pressed him close to the bars. “Look
at his hands.” The imprisoned boy was
down to five digits and none were thumbs.
“I’m not
sure I’d call those hands at this point.”
The Keeper snorted hard before spitting phlegm.
“I don’t care. I’ve killed lots of boys who were missing
fingers,” the boy said, “the Arène was full them.” He shook his arm free of Roy’s grip and took
a step back to regard his mentor. “You
told me to pick and I did. I’m done
playing this game.”
“That boy is a shell,” Roy Kim
said. “He wants to die.”
“Then I’ll help him along.”
“No,” he said, “that would be
mercy and it’s not your place to show mercy.
You are not God. And you’re not
the Luminary. Mercy is for them to
decide. You’re just a tool through which
their mercy might be carried
out. You kill. Do you understand? You don’t pick fights. You don’t sympathize. You don’t give them what they want. You just kill. And that’s all I’m asking you to do
tonight. But if that’s too difficult a
task for you, I can find another Arène boy to train. ”
Cheeks burning, the boy looked down. His throat tightened and his fingers twitched
until they’d curled like spider legs jerking into a ball. He made two useless fists. When he’d been a fledgling in the Arène, his
mentors had told him that humiliation was a greater teacher than failure. This was the basis of their curriculum. Roy Kim, however, rarely resorted to
humiliation tactics and this infrequency had acted like a whetstone, sharpening
his words so that they could peel the boy’s flesh in just a few short
stabs. For a moment he was naked, equal
to the condemned in their cells. In that
moment, he hated his mentor. Everything
was a lesson. Everything was a test. The boy couldn’t even cut his meat without
black eyes on him, watching and sizing up the motion of his wrist. Lesson, lesson, lesson was exhausting on the
best of days and just then, in the dungeon, it was excruciating.
And what was the lesson? This
wasn’t the first time Roy Kim had spoken harshly to him, but it was the first
time he’d been so blatantly unkind, and the first time there had been an
audience. Perhaps that was the lesson. A
reminder that from now on there would be no privacy. Someone would always be there to witness
every failure and reprimand. Someone
like the Keeper. It was the Arène all
over again, but worse, because now there were rules.
“There won’t be any other boys,”
he said and met his mentor’s gaze. “I’m
the only one. It has to be me.”
Roy Kim’s brow pursed a moment
and he nodded. “Pick someone.” It was a quiet command, almost a plea.
The boy walked back to the cell
with two women inside. He exhaled deep
and pointed. The Keeper asked which one,
but he couldn’t respond. The echoes of
the dungeon, the trapped screams now part of the shoddy mortar walls, deafened
him.
“Don’t matter. I’ll pick.”
The Keeper produced a master key from his pocket and entered the
cell. He seized the crying one from her
cellmate’s clinging arms, pulled her from the security of the threadbare
blanket. She shrieked and writhed,
dropping to her knees, going limp.
“I’m pregnant!” she cried. The Keeper didn’t seem to hear.
He gripped her wrists and
dragged her from the cell, laid her at the boy’s feet, “She’s all yours,” then
went back and locked the door. The boy
stood there, head throbbing. Her terror
paralyzed him.
“Please,” she said, “please. It was a small crime. My husband’s going to pay the fee.” She wrapped her arms about his ankles and
pressed her face to his boots, crying on them, wetting the leather. “He’s coming tomorrow. I’ll be a free woman tomorrow. Please.
I want to have my baby.”
“Is that
true?” The boy looked to his mentor.
“It
is! I swear it,” the woman bawled.
“It
don’t matter if it’s true or not.” The
Keeper reached down and grabbed her hair.
He jerked her face away from the boy, forced her to look up at the
grated ceiling, at the icicles. “We
don’t deal in tomorrows, we deal in todays.
And today she’s guilty.” He
tugged up, then down, making her nod.
Somehow during all of this his fingers must have gotten tangled because
when he yanked his hand free, the woman screamed and fell to her face. A fistful of strands and a little bit of
scalp dangled from the Keeper’s fingers. “Guilty. Ain’t that right Roy Kim?”
Warmth
shot up from the boy’s bowels, spread like panic through his arms and
legs. So this was killing? He didn’t want anything to do with it. At least in the Arène, death for one meant life
for another. Killing this woman would
mean nothing. Desperate to make sense of
it all he looked to his mentor.
Roy Kim was smiling.
“Something
Beautiful”
Steam still rose from the
slushed red snow. Her blood must have
been hotter than hell.
“Don’t
let it upset you,” Roy Kim said. “It’s
never a clean kill the first time.
Something always goes wrong. It’s
supposed to. That’s why we
practice.” His voice was strangely
soft. Everything about him was soft now
that the deed was done. The boy wondered
if he would try to hug him and hoped he wouldn’t.
They sat at the top of the
stairwell, their feet dipping into the world of the dungeon. The boy rested his elbows on his knees and
observed the night in quiet contemplation.
His mentor cleaned the axe head with ice and the hem of his cloak. The lantern and the body had gone down into
the dungeon with the Keeper, and the moon had found a new hiding place. Darkness enveloped them and the boy imagined the
Coeur de la Ville as a giant mouth. The snow became frothy spit swilling about
huge, black teeth – the apartments were the molars and the estate houses were
the canines – encircling the gaping maw of the Luminary’s Square. Ahead of him in the distance was the throat,
a hulking black fortress, the Manoir sur
la Colline, ready to swallow him.
And he was ready to let it.
“So you understand the
difference now,” Roy Kim said, “between killing and surviving.”
“Yes.” Looking down at his blood spattered pants and
shoes he pictured the naked woman kneeling in the snow, every part of her
shivering. He saw her neck stretched out
over an old, retired chopping block. The
wood was too sun bleached and cracked to be part of the shows anymore, but, as
Roy Kim had informed him, the despondent slab more than sufficed for practice.
It took
three blows to remove her head. In his
training before tonight, he’d built up a precedent of near-flawless
accuracy. One blow was all it ever took
whether his victim be a melon, a pig, a straw effigy, or a fresh casualty from
the Arène. Yet, tonight, with his mentor
watching him and the Keeper tugging at her hair, forcing her into the correct
position, the axe slipped in his grip, his elbows locked, and his back leg bent
further than it should have. The first
swing had landed across her back, cracking her shoulder blades. He thought of blaming the ice underfoot or
even the inconsistent flicker of the lantern as it fought for dominance over
the moonlight, but it wasn’t any of those things. It was the ripping of his soul that had
botched his aim.
He
struck the neck with the second blow.
The blade had crushed through skin and bone, but stopped halfway. She was dead before the axe fell a third
time. That wasn’t how it was supposed to
go and he couldn’t help but think that it would have been easier with the
sword, or at least less painful. For
both of them. His soul wouldn’t have
ripped as much, if he’d used the sword.
“What
he’s doing down there anyway?” The boy picked up a frozen chunk of mud. “She’s dead.
He can’t get much pleasure out of torturing a corpse, can he?”
“He’s
not torturing her. He’s getting her
remains ready to go back to her family.”
“Is she
going back tonight?”
“Tomorrow,”
Roy Kim said. “It’s too late to notify her family tonight. But tomorrow the Keeper will send a message
and then it’s up to them to come and claim the corpse.”
“And
then they’ll take her to the crematorium?”
“Not
likely.”
The boy
frowned. “I thought everyone went to the
crematorium.”
“They’ll
probably bury her. There’s a grave yard
along the eastern fence.” Roy Kim
gestured with the axe handle.
“What’s
a grave yard?” The boy made a fist about
the mud, thawed it into mush. “Is it
only for women or something?”
“No.” Roy Kim ran his thumb along the clean
blade. “It’s only for citizens.”
The boy
was quiet. Tightening his grip on the
softened clump, he discovered a rock at its core. “I hate citizens.” He wrenched his arm back and threw the mud
ball as hard as he could. Most of the
intended projectile remained in his palm, stuck there as if his heat were an
adhesive. “Damn it.” He huffed and wiped his hand on his thigh.
His
mentor watched him a moment. “Good news,
then. You’ve got one less to hate.”
“Yeah,
but…” The boy frowned and shook his
head. “It shouldn’t have been her.”
“Why?” Roy Kim set the axe aside.
“She was pregnant.”
“We don’t know that for sure.”
“I do,” he said. “I mean, why
would she lie about something like that?”
Roy Kim stroked his eyebrow a
few times before answering. “It’s human
nature. People who are about to die will
say anything to get out of it. And you
can never allow yourself to believe them.”
“I don’t know.” The boy narrowed his eyes. “You’d think she’d have come up with
something a bit more attention grabbing than ‘I’m pregnant,’ if she was just
saying whatever she could think of. Now
if she’d have told us it was the Luminary’s bastard that might have gotten her
something.”
“Yes, it would have gotten her
an apostate’s death,” Roy Kim said.
“Don’t talk like that.”
“It was just an example.” A snowflake landed on his eyelashes and he
blinked and jerked back. Looking up at
the sky he saw that the interspersed clouds had come together to form a white
sheet. More flakes fell. He sniffled and sucked one up into his
nostril. “It’s snowing. Are we done here?”
“The axe needs to go back in the
lock box,” he said, “and I have some forms to fill out for your training. But since you can’t really help with either
of those things, I guess you can go.”
“Good.” The boy stood. Before he could take a single step, Roy Kim
reached out and caught hold of his pant leg, halting him in his escape. “What?”
“You killed for the first time
tonight.” Roy Kim looked up at his
mentee. “Don’t ever forget how it felt.”
“I won’t.” He said and didn’t realize at the time he was
lying.
“Hey,” a
shout came from below, “I got something to show you.”
Roy Kim
let go of his pant leg, but curiosity kept the boy still. He looked down the stairwell and saw the
Keeper climbing toward them, the lantern in one hand and a wrapped up something in the other.
“I just
couldn’t resist,” the Keeper said between wheezes. At the top step he paused and held out the
little bundle. It dripped red. “Take a look, boy. She weren’t lying.”
His
forehead beaded over with sweat or maybe it was just snowflakes sticking to his
skin. He lifted a corner of the dirty
cloth and saw what life looked like when stolen from a womb. A secret no one was supposed to know, blood
caked and limp, hardly bigger than the boy’s thumb. The Keeper laughed.
Jerking his hand back he covered
his mouth but it was too late. Bile
spewed out between his fingers like diarrhea.
It even came out his nose. He
turned and ran.
He didn’t get very far,
however. A few steps into his flight,
his ankle gave out and he went down hard on his hands and knees. Something cut one of his palms, bad enough to
merit stitches, but he didn’t feel it.
He coughed and gasped and spat saliva strings from his lips. Acid burned his throat as a fresh wave of
vomit burst from his mouth. A moment
passed where all he could do was tremble and drain. No one came to help him, and when he felt
well enough to look over his shoulder, the men were gone.
He got to his feet. Puke spittle trickled down his chin. He went to wipe it away but stopped. It was like a badge, an emblem to symbolize
his humanity. Because a monster wouldn’t
have gotten sick like that. A monster
would have smiled.
“Fuck it,” he said and cleaned
his face, nearly rubbing it raw.
The air was static and the snow,
which had seemed so peaceful before, felt ominous somehow.
The world faded to white and
became a different kind of darkness, frightening in its newness. He waited to see if Roy Kim would come back
to check on him, maybe even walk him home, but when the snow started to soak
through his cloak, the boy gave up. His
legs moved and he just went with it, grimacing each time he put weight on his
left ankle.
Despite the sobering pain, he kept
seeing the tiny alien bundle in the Keeper’s palm. He imagined it twitching and he wondered if
it had been alive and afraid when the Keeper had ripped it from its mother’s
belly, or if he’d killed it vicariously with the axe. He wondered if it was a boy or a girl – did
that even matter? – and thought about the man who’d put it there, and
pretended, for a moment, that it had been him.
It was a startling, addicting notion and one he exhausted while trudging
through the Coeur de la Ville lost in
the brilliant darkness.
If he’d been allowed to choose
differently, to kill anyone else but her, that thing, for that’s all it was by the time the Keeper had cut it from
the woman’s stomach, would have continued to grow and eventually have been
born. It would have been beautiful
someday, and it made the boy’s chest ache with a desire he’d never acknowledged
before, yet, he sensed, had always been there.
He knew it was shameful to want for more than he already had, but he
decided that someday he would put a piece of himself inside a girl and their two
pieces would mix into a singular being.
He’d keep it safe, this time, and let it grow into something
beautiful.
The snow had stopped by the time
he reached the edge of the courtyard, leaving the world with a sprinkling of
white and a deceptive warmth that was already melting the frozen mud into brown
slush. But it was familiar slush,
now. He looked up to see the Luminary’s
Stables. He smiled. His legs had known where to go even if he
hadn’t driven them consciously. This was
one of the few places that made sense to him.
The name was a bit of a
misnomer. It was only called the
Luminary’s Stables because everything in North City was known as the Luminary’s
something-or-other. In actuality, the
Luminary had very little to do with this place and, as far as the boy was
concerned, that was one of its more attractive qualities. Its best quality, of course, being
horses. Inside the stable were beasts of
all different breeds and color. Most of
the animals were nothing more than diversion, the pampered pets of the Elder
Families and the Elite, but some belonged to guards and worked just as hard as
their masters. Roy Kim was fortunate
enough to have two horses in the Luminary’s Stable: a bay mare called Tiger Eye
and a white gelding called Alabaster.
They were not for diversion.
These horses, even though his mentor had never said it explicitly, were
for love.
He went to the double gate and
undid the hook latch.
During the first month of his
tutelage, horse grooming, rather than blade training, had been the boy’s
primary focus. At first, he’d thought it
odd for the Death Man’s assistant to spend his time braiding tails and picking
hooves, but he never complained. And why
would he? The work gave peace. Even after the lesson plans changed from
husbandry to honing his axe swing and conditioning his arms to handle a
broadsword, he still sneaked away whenever he could to see the horses. Sometimes his mentor would come with him and
that’s how he’d learned to ride.
Those lessons were the boy’s
favorites. They were never planned out,
never rigid. Riding was all about trial
and error and while the boy knew he’d made his mentor grimace at his falls, he
also thought he made him smile at his triumphs.
But who really knew what made the man smile anymore?
Shuddering, he tugged the handle
and the door gave just enough to snap back into place. He frowned and pushed then pulled again. Still nothing. Stepping back he examined the doors and found
a second lock. A good hand or so down from
the hook latch was a hinged bar of metal reaching from one door to the other
with a fat padlock making sure it didn’t budge.
His hands trembled as he tugged once more. Neither the metal nor the padlock had been
there yesterday so why now? Why today of
all days? Why now, when all he wanted
was to lay his head on Alabaster’s side and hear his tremendous breath, would
the doors be locked? He pulled on the
doors again, shaking them, determined at least to hurt them if he couldn’t beat
them. Old wood creaked, or perhaps it
was something rattling in his throat. He
couldn’t tell.
