Muadhnait took the lead (or 'took point', as my sister would say that Raine liked to call it; but I shan't do so again, because you and I have both heard that half a dozen times too many) as we passed through the narrow kill-corridor which joined the courtyard to the overgrown ex-gardens on the other side. Muadhnait didn't need to activate another one of her light kernels; a trickle of grey illumination from the choked-out skies crept into either end of the passage, joining at the middle like two fingertips separated by an inch of shadow, just enough to see the contours of black stone. Muadhnait went slowly, armour clicking and clanking, crossbow spanned in her gauntlets, edging around the kinks and poking into the nooks.
She tested the recessed stone doors as we went, but she didn't have any better luck with them than I had. I didn't tell her I'd already tried to open all of them last night, because I wanted to see if she possessed some secret I didn't, or if she passed by them without bothering. But the only difference between Muadhnait and I is that her shell was on the outside, while mine was hidden behind a lie.
I didn't bother unwrapping my kitchen knife. Echoes and fog don't care about steel.
She didn't say anything as we went, which was nice.
The kill-corridor ended in the same place it had during the night, regurgitating us at the edge of the vast overgrown gardens. Muadhnait crept out as if the ground was mined and the sky was going to explode, her dome-shaped helmet swivelling left and right. She quickly re-set the string on her crossbow, slung it over her back, and drew one of her swords. I couldn't fault her about any of that, I suppose. She gestured for me to stay back, but I walked right past her. Then she clanked at me, which was new, but I wasn't having any of that either.
I walked straight up to the nearest limp thing lying on the ground and gave it a good hard kick in the head.
It went thonk, and nothing happened.
"They're unstrung," I said. "Nobody at the other end of their strings. Nobody and nothing to string them up."
Muadhnait crept up beside me. She poked the thing on the ground with the tip of her cold iron sword. Nothing happened, again.
Beneath the desultory daylight of this dimension's pretend sun, the gone-wild ex-garden looked just as it had in the night — white grass up to my thighs, black bushes clustered in the memory of overgrown flowerbeds, trees with the bodies of cacti reaching up to touch the low-hanging sheet of fog. In the daylight I could see that it stretched away to the left and right until it grew too dense to see more, but boundary walls showed above all the black and white, killing the illusion of an infinite pocket full of weird and shitty plants. The body of the castle rose ahead of us, her towers and peaks draped in wedding rags of white mist. The steps on the far side of the ex-garden led up to a massive shadowy mouth of white stone. The giant centipede of darkness was gone, which was a a little bit disappointing; I'd guessed it would be, but I'd still hoped to find it napping, so I could sneak up and work my knife between its chitinous plates and into its heart. The molten glow in my gut demanded to be quenched in that sticky, tarry, dark-thick heart's blood.
Oh well. Can't knife everything.
(Or can I? Just you wait.)
The white figures which had tried to bum rush me in the night were now lying all over the ground, limp as fresh corpses, pale as shucked shellfish.
Dolls. Chalky wood, ball joints, no faces. They were similar in style — but not in quality of craft - to the Pale Doll which the Mimic had used to ambush us on the road to the castle. The Pale Doll (yes, that is a proper noun now, or perhaps a pair of proper nouns, if you want to be properly nounced) had been absolutely beautiful, the kind of work a master carpenter might hope to craft after a lifetime of repetition and refinement. The malformed cast-offs littering the ex-garden looked like cheap copies, their joints held together with bits of string and pale wire, their surfaces rough and unfinished, their proportions all jaggedy and uneven.
Last night had been humiliating enough — yes, yes, fine, I admit it! Running away is humiliating. Losing is humiliating! Mock me all you want, you'll have double in return in your own time.
But confirming what I'd seen was personally offensive. Dolls.
Like me, but empty.
I squatted down and found the strings connected to the doll I'd kicked in the head — spider silk lines which vanished in the slightest shadow. When I reached out and plucked a single string, a vast web rose with it, a tangled network of thousands of lines that stretched out across the garden, a carpet of control hidden in the grass.
Muadhnait made an actual sound with her throat and mouth, not quite a word, more like a strangled note of panic. But she didn't interrupt as I unwrapped my knife and sliced through the nearest lines; I think I would have turned the blade on her if she had tried to stop me. Even the molten gold in my belly went cold and hard as I hacked and sawed and nothing happened.
I poked and prodded at the doll a few times, but it didn't turn into a real girl.
"Nothing but wood," I stood up and put my knife away. "Would not."
Muadhnait signed, "You saw these in the night? And they were active then?"
"Mmhmm. Came, saw, ran away. Sawn away would be better. These don't have anything inside them, they're vessels without a sea." I pointed at the steps. "Their puppeteer was over there. A centipede made of the dark."
Muadhnait nodded, big helmet going back and forth. She looked at the doll we'd harassed, then signed: "Are you all right?"
I shrugged. "These were never alive. They don't matter. Just matter without meaning."
Muadhnait looked at the way we were supposed to be going, according to her map — up the stairs and into the castle — then she looked back at the way we'd come, into the mouth of the narrow passageway back to the courtyard. She signed to me, "Will your companions truly be safe? Will witchcraft be enough?"
I almost repeated myself — 'Why do you care?'
But bringing up those words felt like trying to vomit on purpose after a bout of food poisoning had already passed, so I stopped. I was mad as shit about the dolls, but Muadhnait wasn't being all Casma about it.
Muadhnait probably assumed I was thinking about the question, but I wasn't. I was thinking about her, and about how comfortable I felt.
No eyes to see, no voice to speak, just a slit of darkness and hand gestures. Casma wasn't here, so the example I set didn't matter. Tenny wasn't here to get sad if I was a bitch. No need to impress myself upon Kimberly. No need for anything.
I almost felt like I was all alone. (Though we both know I never was.)
"They'll be fine, finer than enough," I replied. "Casma is more than she seems, and seems more than she sees. I'm sorry, I know that doesn't make sense to you, I struggle to make sense of myself. But Casma will see off anything which could hurt them."
Muadhnait said nothing for a moment, then signed, "But she is so young."
"Ten weeks today," I said. "Bigger than she looks."
Muadhnait didn't reply to that one. She probably assumed I was either insane or lying. (Which do you think I am? Both, right? Both.)
We crossed the overgrown garden carefully. Muadhnait was paranoid that the dolls were not truly immobile, or that the master of puppets would return and they would all spring to their feet and murder us. I unwrapped my knife again and dragged it through any particularly thick section in the mat of strings, parting hundreds of lines with each stroke. After a couple of goes at that, Muadhnait started doing the same with her sword. Between us we sabotaged the little army of dolls, or at least as many of them as we could without buggering about in that garden for the entire rest of the day. When we reached the steps on the far side, Muadhnait gave me a nod. I smiled at her.
We'd done something useful, and we'd done it together. Yes, call me a sap if you want, but it felt good, even if I was just smiling at my own projection in that dark slit where her eyes should have been.
Muadhnait gestured at the archway above, then signed for caution, then mounted the steps. I lingered for a moment on the spot where the giant dark centipede had coiled around itself last night. The white stone wasn't stained or marked, as I had suspected.
Next time the giggling darkness might not be a centipede.
"Muadhnait," I said. She was waiting for me a few steps further up, grey armour framed by the mouth of shadow we were about to enter. "At night you build a fire to keep the dark away. But do you do that because of the things that come in the dark, or the dark itself? Does light keep away bad things, or is darkness itself bad?"
Muadhnait signed, "I cannot think on riddles right now. I must steel myself for danger."
"It's a dangerous question. A serious question. Things in the dark, or the darkness itself? Is darkness itself a problem here?"
Muadhnait paused, then answered, "No."
"Huh. Alright then. Or not alright."
"Will you follow me now?" she signed.
"No. But yes. On you go."
Muadhnait carried on up. I fell in beside her heels.
This wing or fraction or part of the castle was all of white stone. The outer layers were encrusted with a thick layer of equally white vines, creeping fifty or sixty feet up, eroding the face of the building, until they reached a height where they couldn't resist the crosswinds that must have blown off the obsidian sea. There was no wind then, just silent stillness that made me want to bang my hands on the steps and hoot and shout and make patterns in the nothing. We walked into a corpse which had been dead for so long that even the worms had left, and the flesh had turned to stone. The steps were cold. The air smelled of fog.
Muadhnait paused at the threshold to make sure I was there, then we slipped into shadow.
Inside wasn't as dark as it had seemed from the ex-garden; the white stone gathered and gifted the illumination that trickled in from the massive archway, added to by the smaller tributaries of light from a dozen passages leading off into the castle.
What can I even say about that big room? White stone, sweeping staircases, hexagonal columns. My sister would call it something like a "grand entrance hall". She'd probably even know the names for some of the architectural features, like how the staircases were supported by slender arches, or how the windows were all extremely high and yet somehow flooded the space with grey light, or how the columns were arranged with precise mathematical irregularity. She would have called it beautiful, claimed it took her breath away, and stood in awe for several moments, probably hoping you would do the same.
But me? I think big tits are more beautiful than ballrooms, I don't need to breathe (which helps with the tits), and I'm not the sort of girl who stands and gawks while stuff happens around me.
It was a football pitch of dusty floor covered in bones and fossilised animal shit. A few pathways had been kicked and stomped through the mess, in regular use by the looks of them. Heather would probably not have noticed how the angles were all fucked up, not until somebody else pointed it out to her, which made me especially glad we'd left Kimberly behind, because she probably would have been freaked out by that.
Wrapped around the base of one of the columns was a giant centipede.
It wasn't the centipede that the giggling darkness had worn like a mask — too small, not dark enough, not rippling with shadow. Mottled red-brown chitin plates caught the light with a mineral shimmer, like wet stone.
I gestured with my kitchen knife. Muadhnait gestured for me to wait.
"I can't," I whispered.
She chopped the air again, then quickly signed, "It is sleeping. We can pass by without struggle."
I bit my bottom lip, squeezed the handle of my knife, and reminded myself that I was with Muadhnait to help rescue her sister. Neassa was small and delicate. Neassa liked dogs and books. Neassa was Muadhnait's little sister. I was there to help. I was going to be a sidekick in a rescue sequence. I was here because I wished it.
Our Lady of the Forded Briar was sitting on the centipede's flank, long legs crossed under her white dress, gesturing with one slender hand at a seam between two plates of chitin, showing me where to put my knife. Her headless spear lay propped against a nearby column.
Her eyes were like the fires in the guts of eviscerated stars, and made a twin ache blossom deep in my abdomen, hot and wet and burning like fever.
"I thought you said you wanted a good ending for her story," I hissed. "I'm doing it."
"Put your blade here," the Briar-bitch said without moving her lips. She gestured again, running a finger along the seam in the centipede's armour. Hooks in my cunt pulled me forward. I dug in my heels and snarled.
"What matters more for a happy end," I spat, "one dead centipede or her sister? Stop it. Stop it or the knife goes in you."
Our Lady of the Forded Briar hopped off the centipede and picked up her headless spear. She gave me a look of casual disappointment that I could have slapped off her face, then another look of smug and inevitable triumph that made me want to bite her lips for her. But then she wandered away from the sleeping centipede and slipped through a side-door on the left of the huge room.
A split-second later the centipede uncoiled from around the base of the pillar in a flash of chitin and scurrying legs. It shot after Our Lady, vanishing into the castle. A few heartbeats later a muffled sound echoed down the distant corridors, a sound that might have been the splitting of carapace and insect flesh, or might have been nothing.
Muadhnait let out a held breath, quite clearly, the sound heaving within her armour. She lowered her sword and signed at me rapidly: "You roused it by speaking."
Then she paused, hand halfway to the next sign.
"Yes, I'm crazy, and I was talking to myself," I said. "Don't worry about it. Don't worry at me. Just don't."
Muadhnait spread one hand in a helpless shrug.
"Is this place actually inhabited, or inhabited by actual memory?" I asked. "Is that the kind of thing we're going to run into? Bugs and carrion? Shit on the floors and dust on the shit?"
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Muadhnait didn't answer for a moment. Doubtless she was trying to compose herself in light of the new knowledge that she was descending into this dungeon crawl with a crazy little bitch behind her. (And yes, she was, don't pretend otherwise.) But then she signed, "Yes, it is inhabited, but not in the way that people inhabit a place. The centipede was nothing. A pest creature. A passing animal. The current inhabitants of this closed stone will be deep in the dark, or living in patterns that we cannot intersect with directly. It is best for us if we do not try to do so."
"And we're supposed to do that while also finding your sister?" I asked. "Or finding ourselves found by those we're not trying to find?"
Muadhnait shrugged. She gestured with her sword.
"It's not hopeless," I said. "We meet a fairy, I stab a fairy. That's how we're going to do this, and then it'll be done. We are going to find your sister."
Muadhnait nodded, then signed, "Don't touch anything. Don't eat anything. Don't speak to anything."
"Two out of three I can do."
Muadhnait sighed inside her armour. At least I knew she had lungs in there.
"Which way now?" I asked. "You're the one with the map. Map us a path."
Muadhnait gestured left — at the exact same carven doorway the Briar-bitch had taken — then right, at a much wider portal further down the entrance hall, then up one of the winding staircases, toward a huge round hole which looked like it had been melted through the white stone wall. Then she signed, "Public plaza. Prisons. Embassy complex."
"Why those places? Places for a sister? Place her exact?"
Muadhnait hesitated.
I spoke before she could find a clean lie. "Somebody else told you those would be the best places to look, didn't they?"
Muadhnait shook her head, then signed, "She could be anywhere. She is either an attraction, a prisoner, or an honoured guest."
"If the things that live here now use it in the same way your people used to, sure."
Muadhnait flinched, helmet rotating to look at me. She started to sign, "How do you—"
"It's obvious enough, or enough to be obvious. People lived here once, now they don't. You don't have to talk about it. Attraction, prisoner, or honoured guest, fair enough. Let's shut up and shoot on and shut down and— tch." I tutted softly.
I didn't want to dent Muadhnait's optimism. Attraction, prisoner, or honoured guest, sure — or abject slave or merely meat or something worse.
Muadhnait gestured, "Which first?"
I pointed up. "Up to down, start on high. Crap runs with gravity."
We mounted the stairs, disturbing the layer of old bones and dried-out animal droppings (and yes, I tried not to step on anything too disgusting with my bare feet, not that it mattered). Muadhnait went first, cold iron sword in her hands, walking slowly up the steps as if she expected a fresh centipede to drop from the ceiling onto our heads. I ignored the hooks of molten gold dragging in my guts, trying to pull me back down toward Our Lady of the Forded Briar. Once I glanced back and saw her peeking around the edge of the door frame which led to the public plaza.
But I knew we wouldn't find Neassa down there. The cunt of a goddess wanted something else from me, and I didn't feel like giving anything.
We exited the big room at what felt like three floors up, through a ragged hole of melted white stone, into a corridor tiled in black and white. The light up there was thinner and greasier, filtered through banks of filthy windows and mile after mile of fog beyond the walls — but it was still bright enough that we could both see without burning one of Muadhnait's precious light kernels.
Light, however, only means you can see things — it doesn't mean you can tell what the hell you're looking at. Illumination does not reveal the pattern of reality, it just brings it to the surface, and sometimes the surface is just as much a pattern itself as what lay beneath. Or, as my beloved sister is so fond of saying in so many circuitous ways, to observe is not necessarily to understand. I shan't belabour you with that point like she did, but we are both forced to admit that she was right.
(Though I don't have to be forced, not by her.)
The inner layout of the black-and-white castle was fiendishly complicated. It wasn't a maze, either intentional or as the product of some tiresomely predictable Outsider logic — if it had been one of those, I might have been tempted to unravel the pattern on purpose, and save us the time. But it was a different kind of pattern, made from the slow accretion of a million tiny decisions over longer than I felt like rummaging around in. If anything it reminded me of the Barnslow House, a structure added to on the inside as needed, growing more complex with each twist and turn, like the innards of a shelled cephalopod now frozen in rock so long after death. Corridors branched off from each other at random, jerking and twisting around rooms of all shapes and sizes, some of those rooms all joined together in little suites or groupings. We peered into empty spaces as big as aircraft hangars, their windows long smashed and the glass plucked away and the floor littered with droppings. We passed bedrooms with their furnishings all rotted but their wooden bed frames still standing. Other rooms, ones without windows and tucked away from the others, seemed to have once been full of machines, now reduced to rust stains and faded outlines on the floor. The weirdest rooms of all were the ones where nothing seemed to have decayed or been stolen or even moved — there was an office that Muadhnait bid me not step inside, the desk still covered with dustless papers, the upholstered chair turned aside as if somebody had only just left their work.
Muadhnait marked the junctions and walls with chalk as we went, and added notes to her maps, which turned out to be only partly accurate.
"If your maps are not well mapped," I said, "does that mean others have been re-mapping these innards in the time since then? Has this place been rebuilt, walls moved around, moves made to the walls?"
Muadhnait shook her head. "Closed stone moves by itself. Fairies and others do not have the inclination to build."
"Figures you'd say that."
Muadhnait didn't talk much while we searched for the 'embassy complex'; she kept her sword in hand whenever possible, always listening for tell-tale noises from the stony deep.
The journey wasn't boring though. We gained unseen company.
(You thought I didn't notice?)
It started as footsteps — sometimes parallel to ours but hidden behind a wall or just out of sight, sometimes far ahead of our path or lagging behind in the corridors we'd already passed. The footsteps weren't always the same, they varied in weight and sound and stride — sometimes boots, sometimes steel, sometimes the barefoot patter of running children. The first time we heard them so clearly, Muadhnait froze for two whole minutes, then advised me not to attempt to find the source of the footsteps, because they weren't real; I didn't need to be told that, because I'd already been paying attention for long enough.
After that came whispers, floating down the corridors, echoing off the stone, the words always too indistinct to make out. They floated away then drew closer; once they seemed to be only six inches from the back of my head. Muadhnait told me not to listen. I told her I didn't need any help doing that.
Faces started to appear in the stone, always gone when you looked at them dead on. The ends of the occasional dark corridors seemed to hide shadowy, childlike figures just beyond the border of the light, holding hands and grinning at us. A few times when we passed doorways I spotted something peripheral — a girl lying on a bed, a man and a woman arguing, a deer with a bloody muzzle and hands for hooves, a naked old lady drooling pus. But whenever I looked there was nothing there, and Muadhnait may as well have been wearing blinders.
"Fairy echoes," Muadhnait explained. "I told you already, they exist in a way we cannot, and we exist in a way they cannot, unless it is night or under certain other conditions. Touch nothing. Eat nothing. Say as little as possible."
"Easy."
…
Do you think I was afraid?
Of a little Scooby-Doo spook show? Do you really believe that, for even a heartbeat? Believe what you want, but some beliefs don't survive the edge of reality. A knife in my hand is much scarier than whispers and shadows, and it can stop any heartbeat a lot easier than blanket-ghost bullshit.
No, I wasn't scared. Don't kid yourself.
…
We finally found the embassy complex after forty four minutes and sixteen seconds of searching, (yes, I counted, and no, it wasn't for Casma, it was for me. And you, I suppose.) The complex was a huge suite of rooms and chambers, practically a separate building unto itself, grown inside the corpse of the castle like an osseous tumour petrified and preserved by the death of the host. There was only one way in or out of the complex — a sort of miniature entrance hall with guard posts cut into the stone, separated from the castle by an open walkway. Perhaps there had been a desk there once, but it had been reduced to a sagging mess of dry rot by time and ignorance.
It was also dead quiet, just as abandoned as the rest of the castle we'd seen so far. Muadhnait put on a brave face — a tilt of her helmet, a tightening of her knuckles on her sword — and signed that we should search every room anyway. She already knew this wasn't the place where we'd find her sister, but I didn't say anything, because that wouldn't help.
The contents of the embassy complex were on average a little better preserved than the other parts of the castle we'd passed through to get there — slightly less rot and rust, and significantly more intact furniture, mostly because the complex had fewer windows, and therefore fewer points of entrance for the thick fog that hung beyond every aperture. This also meant that some rooms in the core of the structure were actually, properly, fully dark, so Muadhnait was finally forced to ignite one of her light kernels. She attached it to the front of her armour with a little strap, and advised me not to stray into the dark by myself.
We tramped through bunk-rooms lined with rows of ancient wooden beds, and smaller bedrooms for more important people with fancy drapes all gone to threadbare ruin. Muadhnait sorted through the contents of forgotten offices and peeked behind the barrels and crates of storerooms that now stored nothing but rodent droppings and weird smells.
Her sister was not there. We searched in vain. Obviously
So, you may ask the obvious question (and I won't get mad at you) — why am I telling you about this? I'm not my sister, I don't share her natural interest in the cold and stony guts of these places. I find little romance in them, (except when they live by her words alone) and I had no desire to linger there longer than we needed, not with no Mimic to strangle nor any fairies to threaten with my knife.
So, why bother?
Because of the dolls, of course.
Don't tell me you didn't see this coming. I sure did.
I'd spotted a few in the parts of the castle we'd passed through, but I hadn't wanted to stop and examine them, not when Muadhnait was so focused on pushing ahead, all full of enthusiastic hope. But the embassy complex was stuffed with them, they were everywhere — sitting on the shattered remains of ancient chairs, leaning in the sills of glassless windows, lying in the big rusted iron tubs of the bathrooms, posed in casual conversation over mess hall tables, locked in passionate embraces on the scraps of mattress and rotten sheets left on the memory of beds.
They weren't quite like the dolls I'd encountered down in the ex-garden. If the Pale Doll was a masterwork and the horde had been chaff swept off the floor, these were halfway between. The solid work of a journeyman, competent enough. They had clean ball-and-sockets at their joints, limbs and torsos sanded down tolerably well enough, and their blank heads held at least a suggestion of cheek and brow and eye socket. All of them were human-shaped and most of them wore clothes — dresses, skirts, weird shapeless tops. The clothes themselves were free from the ravages of time, as if they'd been posed like that only minutes before we entered each room.
I put that idea to Muadhnait, but she shook her head.
"This behaviour is known," she signed. "Better to ignore them."
Ha.
Heather would have known me better.
When we finished searching the embassy complex and found it embarrassingly empty, Muadhnait returned to one of the least rotten rooms — a sort of large office on one side of the structure, with three intact windows which looked out over the tangled guts of the castle, down onto a mess of inner courtyards and the sides of other towers, all barely visible through the drifts of thick fog clinging to the outside walls. The wooden furniture in the office was almost completely preserved, all dark wood like Muadhnait had used for our fire in the abandoned village. A few large metal objects had rusted away completely, leaving red stains on the stone floor — more machines perhaps, attended by the ghosts of wires that led out of the room, long since corroded to nothing.
Muadhnait pulled wooden boxes off wooden shelves and extracted thin wood-bound sheaves of paper, then spread them out on one of the intact desks and started flicking through the pages. She was surprisingly dexterous in those metal gauntlets.
"You haven't explained anything to me," I said. "Explain or extend."
Muadhnait glanced up, darkness inside her helmet. One hand hesitated.
"This isn't looking for your sister." I gestured at the papers with my knife, though it was still wrapped up in the tea towel. "What are those?"
Muadhnait answered quickly enough. "The last records before the hold fell," she signed. "At least the ones in here, in the embassy. They probably won't tell me anything. I'm sorry that I didn't stop to explain. I thought maybe—"
She stopped there, hesitating over saying anything more.
She thought she might find her sister on the first try, with this strange little Outsider at her side, and now she was grasping at straws. She was so very much like my sister, like another Heather behind metal and darkness.
"Search what you have to search," I said. "But let's search on quick. When you're ready and quickened."
Muadhnait nodded, then resumed flicking through the documents.
I turned away and looked at the dolls.
Oh, the perks of being me.
There were three of them in that big office. Two were sitting on ancient armchairs, the leather and stuffing all rotted away, leaving only bare wooden frames; those two dolls wore clothes that made them look like important and boring people. The third, however, was sitting on the edge of a desk, legs crossed, arms braced as if showing off its torso. That third doll wore a long gauzy skirt, a frilled blouse, and a kind of cape in thick peach-pink fabric. Very flash.
I couldn't see any strings, not like I had with the Pale Doll. I unwrapped my knife and waved it back and forth a few times, but the edge didn't snag on any unseen sliver lines.
Muadhnait got my attention with a click-click of her gauntlets, then signed: "Please don't do that."
"I want to touch the dolls. Are they too touchy for touching, or will a little poke set off the fairies?"
Muadhnait looked like she wanted to sigh. Amazing what the human body can communicate even through all that metal. She signed, "I think it's okay, but don't do anything unnatural with them."
"What do you think I'm going to do?"
Muadhnait hesitated.
I came to her rescue; I was being unfair. "I'm a doll too, but I'm not going to fuck them. Don't worry about that."
Muadhnait looked back down and left me to my doll fucking.
The flashy doll sitting on the table was very well made. The joints were sanded and smooth and precise, satisfying to run my hands over, to feel how they fit together. When I took one of her hands and raised it in my own, her elbow joint slid without too much stiff friction, but stayed in place when I let it go. Some magical bullshit, no doubt, but the effect was pleasing. I ran my hands over her thighs and back and shoulders, feeling for the curves of her construction. I tapped on her skull and belly, searching for hollow places, but she was solid wood all the way through.
I made sure Muadhnait was focused on her papers before I kissed the doll. Her fingers were cool and slim. She had no lips, but I made do.
There was nothing there, of course. Nothing inside.
I removed the pinkish cape from her shoulders and draped it over my own. It didn't have a clasp at the neck, just two thick arms of fabric which crossed over the collarbone. It was very thick and very warm and I didn't need it at all. Perhaps if this day's search was fruitless, I could give it to Kimberly, or Tenny.
I patted the doll's cheek. She didn't respond, because she was nothing.
Was this doll what the Mimic saw me as? A pretty little thing to be dressed up and dressed down? Posed and adjusted and played with, but never played by in return?
"Muadhnait," I said. "Does this really all belong to the Mimic, the one fairy we saw? It's an awful lot of castle for one girl, even for girls who like castles."
Muadhnait glanced up from the papers on the desk. She signed, "The fairy we saw is one of the few able to exist like we do. She is not the only one here, but she is the one who took my sister."
"And these dolls are hers? She dolls them up?"
Muadhnait shrugged. She looked back down.
"Why are those documents still here?" I asked. "If your people have been to this place so many times, why would they leave something like that behind?"
Muadhnait signed without looking up. "Closed stone changes. It may not have been found before."
I walked away from the doll — with a final pat on her backside — and toward Muadhnait. She still didn't look up.
"And I thought this was supposed to be dangerous," I said. "Thought I'd be sticking my knife into something by now. Thought I'd thought it through, hadn't I?"
Muadhnait's helmet came up slightly. She signed, "I think this part of the castle used to be much busier. We've gotten lucky."
"We could have brought the others. Cas, Tenns, Kim. Not dangerous at all."
Muadhnait picked up the tone of my voice. She straightened up slowly, then lifted her sword from where it rested against the side of the desk.
She signed, "I am in armour and you are not human. The others would present more tempting targets. I have not deceived you."
"I know," I said. I looked down at my knife, still wrapped in the tea towel. The little maids reminded me to be good. "But there's something you're not telling me. Isn't there?"
Muadhnait didn't hesitate, she just didn't know what to say. And I couldn't read that.
We stared at each other for a moment, which was actually kind of nice.
Then Muadhnait signed, "You probably shouldn't wear that cloak."
"I like it. What aren't you telling me, Muadhnait?"
"I really think you should take it off."
"All of it? What aren't you telling me?"
"Nothing," she signed. "I've told you everything. And—"
"No, there's something. There's … hm?"
I trailed off at the sound of marching feet.
Those feet were not like the scampering phantoms we'd heard on the way to the embassy complex — they were many and heavy and stepping in time. They were beyond the walls, tramping through the courtyards and open-topped passageways of the castle innards.
Muadhnait and I hurried over to the trio of intact windows, trying to peer down through the veils of fog; Muadhnait's helmet clicked against the glass. For a couple of minutes we saw nothing but black and white stone wreathed in drifting banks of mist. But then the fog shifted as if a giant was stirring within. A moment later a thousand-headed serpent slithered into view.
A procession of dolls was winding through the open places of the castle. They were wrapped in banners and streamers of black and white, carrying silk canopies aloft on dark wooden poles. A kind of palanquin bobbed amid the snake of heads, close to the tip of the procession, carried by dozens of ball-jointed arms.
In the midst of the parade were a few figures who stood out from all the wood — twisted strangeness of limb and vine and trunk.
One of them, near the rear, was my little slut of a Mimic.
"It's her," I said. "It's her, and others, and otherwise, and not wise to other—" I bit my tongue as hard as I could, because I could not afford to lose my train of thought now. "How do we get down there? Downed without downing ourselves?" I pushed at the windows, but they were sealed, without latches or locks. I looked up at Muadhnait. "How—"
Muadhnait rounded on me and raised her sword.
She tried to grab me with her other hand, swiping for my shoulder. She was quick, but I was quicker and smaller and a lot more clever. I darted sideways.
And then a wooden doll flashed past me, wearing a skirt and a blouse, missing her cloak.
She slammed into Muadhnait, who slammed into the glass of the window. The glass shattered outward, and Muadhnait fell through, carrying the doll after her, the cold iron sword tangled between them.
Muadhnait dropped like a rock.
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