Chapter 3 White Table
WHITE TABLE
ELLA RODE AN Academy horse through several hours of farmland to an ancient graveyard. It was swamped by monsoons during the rainy seasons, and the sunken stones were one of the few markers along an overgrown, rocky path to a well-hidden cottage.
Ella recalled spending young summers catching frogs and lizards and building homes for them around potholes in the road.
This territory had been vetted for mutations and auctioned off at a low price years ago, far from the dangerous frontiers where Ella and her team had frequently camped.
Still, some mutations could happen spontaneously, and most people didn’t risk such a reclusive lifestyle.
It would only take an edible plant mutated to be poisonous or perhaps a mutated farm animal to kill someone.
She tied her horse up on a tree branch, clenching and unclenching her hands as she ducked under the willows to reach the steps of the cottage.
She balanced over the stones meant to stave off the encroaching marshes, knocking on the door as she scanned the forest of mossy trees and the fields beyond, which bloomed with wildflowers. Loose chickens pecked along a nearby creek, and a pet pig snorted behind the house.
“You’re late,” Samual announced, the welcome of any true Listener. They could be a difficult bunch, and it wasn’t unusual for those not vetted by the capital to be con artists and magicians, but Samual was as real as she’d seen.
He’d been an instructor in the Academy in Ella’s early days, freshly retired, perhaps in preparation for adopting her when neither of them knew he’d find her begging on the streets of the capital.
Ella opened the door, dodging a string of herbs and mushrooms freshly picked from the morning. She navigated past misplaced books and furniture, noticing a garden snake as it scurried under a nearby bookcase.
She followed the sounds of chopping to Samual’s snug kitchen before inching onto a familiar stool near the kitchen entrance.
Ella resisted the urge to fidget as he chopped with his back to her, hunched in a fluffy brown robe and knit cap. He was old when she first met him, and he seemed just as old now, remarkably incapable of change.
“You’ve got desperation pouring out,” Samual said between slow chops. The sky itself could fall, and he’d still take his time. He slid what appeared to be peppers into a wooden bowl to his right. “Yes, I know what happened.”
Ella stifled her hurt at the firmness of his tone as if he were scolding her. He washed his hands in a bowl and dried them using a cloth that hung in front of the kitchen window. The foggy green panes of glass were open to the yard outside, where livestock roamed freely.
“You always put too much trust in Crow.”
“I didn’t come here for a speech,” Ella bit, but when Samual turned, there was a tenderness in his eyes that made her feel like a little girl again. She’d sat on this stool hundreds of times in the same obstinate way.
“You loved them very much.” Samual pulled up another stool in front of hers and took a seat. “You couldn’t help them. Our lives are just one short prayer in service to something. Take a breath. A breath is always something we can have right now.”
Despite resenting his attempts to calm her down, she listened, the tightness in her chest expanding.
“How do I get to The Quiet?” Ella exhaled, feeling a strange urgency to leave. It had been like this for some years now. She resented how they’d grown apart, but Samual was a true Listener, and the raw truth was so often like sandpaper that many relationships could only survive in brief moments.
He peeled her hands away from each other and opened her palms as he pressed his thumbs into them. It was a steady feeling, something he’d done to help calm her down when she’d had outbursts as a girl.
She yanked her hands back. “I’m not a child.”
“You are right now.”
“I don’t want to feel better.”
“You’ve never wanted that,” Samual whispered back, and she didn’t argue.
“I won’t stop you.” With a weak smile, his hands returned to his lap, and he watched them there. “I’ve never been able to stop you. You’re like a mule, passive until the moment you aren’t. I knew when I took you in that the Spirits had unfinished business with you.”
“Spirits have nothing to do with it,” she replied. “I have to know. I have to know more about this. I can’t rest until I do.”
“We all have reasons to do the things we need to do, but the reasons we tell ourselves are rarely the real ones,” Samual replied, “You’ve always denied your power as a Listener, Ella. You denied the power of everything, but it takes great faith in the Spirits to confront them with your losses.”
“I need to know why.” Ella thought of how she could convince Samual to tell her the answer, to give her the way to execute her wild journey.
It was dangerous, defying a long list of rational objections.
She knew that. The Imperia’s soldiers would arrest her if they discovered she was here asking this question.
Listener knowledge was a well-guarded privilege, and The Quiet was akin to a holy land.
“There’s one other gate, a pool in Tunedyl Forest,” Samual started.
“At noon, the sun is reflected perfectly in the pool. If you dive in quickly enough to the reflection of the sun, you’ll land in The Quiet.
It’s the only other way to cross over without using the pool that the capital built itself around. ”
“Just like that?” Ella searched his face for any indication that he was joking with her, unlike him as it was. “That’s it?”
“Don’t look at me as if I’m giving you my permission. Quite the opposite,” Samual said. “I’m afraid there is a very dangerous catch. There is a mutation in those woods, one that may be the only thing capable of turning you offthis path you’re on.”
Ella filed through her knowledge of the field and though she knew of Tunedyl, she hadn’t heard of any mutations there powerful enough to warrant such an introduction. She was certain Crow would have known about it, and it wasn’t a good sign he hadn’t attempted it himself. Then again, maybe he had.
“It’s convenient for the capital that they don’t have to guard two gateways to The Quiet and so we leave it alone,” Samual continued, perhaps reading the confusion on her face.
“We’ve handled every mutated thing there is,” Ella said.
“Not a human one.”
“The longest case of a human mutation is only six months. Even if they are resistant to it and they look mostly human, the Madness eventually eats them.” Ella had seen a few cases before, people suffering from living decay like leprosy.
Samual nodded but didn’t offer any answers. “What?” she pushed, “What is it?”
“For a human to exist this long after being mutated by Madness, it would have to be incredibly stable, which very well means that the mutation didn’t occur naturally but was designed.”
“You’d have to channel Madness to design a mutation. It would have to be a curse, not a mutation.” Ella objected, which she soon realized wasn’t a real objection at all, not to him. Ella chuckled darkly until she saw that Samual seemed serious.
There were always rumors of Strike, mostly among the uneducated or superstitious.
The most remote areas of the world almost made a sport out of avoiding them through nonsensical and ritualistic practices that could even border on inhumane.
One of these was the consumption of the drug Amnesia, which people had been taking for so many generations, that they’d forgotten why they’d started taking it in the first place.
The streets were rife with homeless and orphans who’d taken the drug only for the sake of forgetting their own pain.
“You can’t be serious,” Ella said. “You can’t actually believe this.”
“It’s alright to be afraid.”
“Afraid? I’m not the one making up stories about Strike.
” Ella straightened. “Fanatics have been trying to find a Strike for decades. What makes you think there is a way one is still roaming around, cursing people?” Ella took a restless step off of the stool, pacing to the window and looking out, half wanting to crawl through it.
“Can I ask you a question about last night?” Samual asked.
It was the same way that Angelina had spoken to her as if they could see a larger picture that she couldn’t.
She didn’t doubt they could. She knew her vision was focused through a tunnel with a single objective, and she didn’t care.
She couldn’t sleep, eat, or think about anything else. Action was her only remedy now.
She kept her eyes focused out of the window on the chickens pecking aimlessly outside.
She was jealous of the animals and plants.
She’d wanted to be a lizard or frog, feeling sometimes that she had the spirit of an animal wrestled into a woman’s body.
Watching them helped her feel more at peace in the moment.
She and Samual used to sit and watch the yard each morning with cups of brewed tea. The world was simpler then, but something about the Scouts had called her to the Academy. She’d had a need to break out into the vastness of the world, to explore its wounds and mend it.
Samual didn’t rush, perhaps more for her sake than his own. “Embolisms rupture realities. You experienced this?”
“Yes.”
“Can you describe it?”
“Droplets in the air that I guess used to be leaves, melted earth dripping off the tree branches, shards of air lodged into the ground,” Ella said mechanically as if providing a traditional report, a step away from any feeling as if it lingered like a cliff beside her.
“Deeper than a normal mutation,” she added, avoiding any description of what had happened to the human bodies.
“It was like everything bled together into a bowl, and not everything was able to separate itself to come back out again,” Samual replied.
“Sure,” Ella said, grateful at Samual’s simplistic explanation when she didn’t want to relive the worst of it.