Team Games and Candles - Dessert
Treats of Concussed Jailbreakery
You’re snacking on In Different Color, a fairy tale.
Missed the Appetizer or Entrée?
See The Menu for more treats.
“Fight on my fellows; you pilgrims and day-trippers! Fight to see the sights! Fight to smell the smells! Fight fast, for soon we must fly. And most important; fight for Jodee Coats! Yeepyeepyoopyoopyoop!”
A young man’s deep, sourceless voice reached Mr. Grey through his delirium. He felt sure the last utterance had been garbled by his bandaged head. Mr. Grey lifted the feather dressing off his eyes and squinted.
The Glory Days Rain Fish Detainment and Entertainment Facility overflowed; not with water, but wild brawling. In every ankle-deep street; around every moss-covered, half-sunken fish statue; on the pebbled quarry paths high above; tourists from outside the facility battled the Glorious Defense Force. The Defense Force soldiers fought with fist and foot. As Honeydew had said, they’d left their guns behind during the dodgeball tournament. The tourists wielded a diverse array of weapons: wooden mallets, metal clubs, boney shoulders. They used these liberally against the facility defenders.
Among both ranks, men and women brandished enchanting instruments in battle. Mr. Grey had expected trumpets for the soldiers, but most of them carried small leather drums. They used handfuls of pebbles and quick battle-beats to trip tourists by enchanting laces into knots. The tourists, on the other hand, carried instruments of music varied as their instruments of war: fiddles, flutes, trumpets, tubas, oboes, kotos, and one tourist in a mistletoe robe with a torso-harnessed drum-kit. The players enchanted their foes with sand in the eyes, or soreness in the throat, or hangnails. Over all the diverse, tumbling strains, Mr. Grey once more heard - distinctly - the high-pitched bagpipe wheeze.
Mr. Grey’s litter-bearers had dropped him when they saw the attacking tourists. Now Mr. Grey lay alone on his stretcher in the midst of the bustle in a flooded street; soaking his lower robe. Mr. Grey palmed himself to a rigid stand with the help of a splintery driftwood wall. He swayed. He stabilized his spinning head with a wet hand. He looked along the flooded street for Honeydew or Tom. He saw neither.
Mr. Grey decided to go to the infirmary. That was Honeydew’s scheme. That was his reason for going, he told himself. No other.
He set his feet splashing along the flooded paths between quarry buildings. He stumbled - genuinely stumbled, not ‘introduced an asynchronous half-step into his walking rhythm’ - across the open spaces. The tumult of battle and enchantment rolled past like ripples from the prow of a sailing ship. Soldier and tourist alike ignored Mr. Grey like a teetering drunk. The screaming and smacking of battle rubbed against his ear, but the fighters let Mr. Grey slip through. Just ahead, a mass of screaming tourists threw themselves against an organized line of soldiers formed into a wall of bracers and breastplates. Mr. Grey lurched at precisely the right moment, and flanking-maneuvered around the formation. He glided, wraithlike, through the battle, neither affecting nor being affected by its participants. The same as he’d glided, wraithlike, through the Tockwork Crags; with less control.
In this way he reached the infirmary.
Mr. Grey felt instinctual, animal, in his actions. He sank like an old hound against the inconspicuous building’s firm stone. He’d found walking somehow taxing. He breathed heavily through his nose, like a snorting bull, against the wall. Two tourists - a brother and sister, one wearing a deerskin robe, the other one of palm leaves - charged past Mr. Grey. He opened his mouth to say, “After you, by all means.” They chimed through the beaded infirmary threshold without looking at him; perhaps because Mr. Grey lay like a chameleon against the wall’s dull stones.
Mr. Grey waited courteously while the pair went alone inside the squat structure; in case they needed privacy with an attending physician. Disjointed enchantments resounded off the rough quarry walls, and the noisy crash of shoulders and armor joined the noisy crash of water pouring over the sawtooth cliffs. He heard a cry from that same young voice. “Let us wet our socks, fellows! We must get gone fast! Yes yes yes yes yes. Before the soldiers find guns. HAHAHAHAHA!” Mr. Grey also heard, closer, the bagpipes’ skirl.
Mr. Grey actually had meant to wait. But his knees buckled, and his vision swirled like a bubble’s membrane, and the song and smash of battle crept closer with each ticker tock in his pocket. The two who’d gone in ahead were probably attackers, Mr. Grey belatedly realized, who’d entered the infirmary as looters rather than patients. With these ideas driving him, Mr. Grey stumbled through the beaded threshold.
Mr. Grey passed down a zigzag, narrow hallway, lined in animal skins and frescoes of human anatomy. In delirium he passed by the infirmary office door. He passed through a further set of interior beads. Mr. Grey unintentionally entered the warehouse, the same Honeydew had schemed to infiltrate. The building must’ve been of non-Euclidean architecture. From the outside it had been a square, single-story construction of stone. But inside, the warehouse ceiling rose into darkness, high past the scant flickering light of the room’s candles.
Crates and barrels rose like a forest around Mr. Grey; tall, thin, uneven stacks. Mr. Grey tried placing his palm on these to steady his stumbling gait. But the towers of quarry supplies, hardcotton rations, and tourist-luggage teetered at the faintest touch. He stumbled on, unaided, through the dark, crooked woods.
Mr. Grey tripped and nearly tumbled full over when his foot met some unseen, soft mound on the floor. He barely caught himself against a gaunt tower of suitcases, which wobbled. Mr. Grey plucked the nearest half-melted candle from the top of a suitcase, and brought it lower to the floor.
Two bodies lay sprawled across the rough tile. They were the looters who’d run in before. He saw they still existed from the way their breath stirred the dust. The bright cherry marks on their skulls showed they’d been bludgeoned. Also on the floor, against one nearby stack, he saw more familiar shapes: Tom’s mallet, his violin, and the rest of their luggage.
From outside - down the crooked hallway and through the warehouse woods - came the clash of battle and bagpipes. But both were drowned by a sharp, ringing blast in Mr. Grey’s ears. He turned unsteadily.
Ordus strutted from behind a stack. A victory march blared off his seashell horn. His feet twisted in a military about-face to Mr. Grey. He blew a last, loud peal, stopped next to Mr. Grey’s belongings, and sheathed the trumpet across his back, next to his gun. The marching tune faded, but a triumphant look lingered in his flushed cheeks, clenched fists, and savagely-happy eyes.
Ordus crossed his arms, and said, “Well… well… well. So you thought I didn’t know your plan? Stupid! The Sun Fish sees all, knows all. I read his omens in the condensation on my trumpet’s bell. I knew you’d come looking for these.” He jerked his head toward the violin and mallet. “I’ve caught you in crimes against the king. No more pretending you’re just some tourist grunt. You’re going to tell me exactly what Jodee’s planning.”
“That’s not quite… oh, pardon me,” said Mr. Grey. He waited a tock for the forest of stacked crates to stop swaying, then went on. “I meant to say this. Yes, technically speaking, I did come for the violin. And the rest of our luggage. But-”
“From the statue’s mouth! Are you Jodee’s personal grand enchanter then? I bet you and Jodee think you’ve got the Clam Fish on your side. You think your fiddle’s blessed against wrong notes, don’t you? Well I’ve got news for you buddy; that isn’t even close to true. If you think any of the great Fish would help a criminal - a traitor! - you’re lying in your own ear.”
“Please… I just don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not working with Jodee. And I don’t know much about clams.”
“Yeah right. Rat-hair lady spilled everything. You and Jodee go way back. And don’t pretend you don’t know that the Clam Fish blesses fiddle players particularly. Do you think I’m stupid?”
Ordus stepped closer. To Mr. Grey, the diegeonary seemed to reel his flushed face back and forth like a duck. The distant bagpipe drone filled Mr. Grey’s brain. He felt his body sway; he could not keep steady. From outside, there came once more the young man’s cry. “Time to get us gone; they’re taking the armory. The guns are coming!”
Ordus smirked. He reached into a pouch, threw a clatter of pebbles on the floor, and redrew the trumpet from its holster. Mr. Grey wondered why he’d stowed it in the first place. Ordus said, “Last chance buddy. I don’t want to enchant on you, but I will if I need to.”
Mr. Grey opened his mouth. But saying words seemed hard; or, for that matter, thinking them into sentences.
Ordus shook his head. “So be it,” he said. The angry, armored soldier brought the trumpet to his lips.
Suddenly, the pipes that had been droning louder and louder with each tock, stopped. A scurry sounded behind Ordus. The Diegeonary and Mr. Grey turned. A shape sprung around one of the teetering stacks. It rushed and whacked Ordus with a set of bronze bagpipes. The instrument let out a single wheeze. Ordus collapsed in a heap.
Mr. Grey saw, standing before him… Well, it must have been a dizzy-vision! A man, with a bronze breastplate matching his bagpipes, a ragged robe in the single-strap style, and in place of a head, a candle. The man had no eyes or mouth or face at all. Just a partially-melted, unlit, wax candle, where a head ought to go. Mr. Grey took a shaky step back. Just then, Honeydew and Tom rushed in behind the strange man.
“No time to explain,” said Tom in quick growl; like a tram racing through a gravel canal. “He’s on the attacker’s side. He’ll help us break out.”
Honeydew clicked her agreement, and added, “Let’s get gone.”
Mr. Grey raised a finger. He wanted to suggest that these attacking tourists - and the man with a candle for a head - didn’t seem to be on the law’s side; given they’d just assaulted a military outpost and bludgeoned a king’s soldier unconscious. His eyes caught, however, the dry tip of the raised, grey digit. The room closed to a dark tunnel around that little finger.
Mr. Grey didn’t feel a thing when his body hit the hard tile floor.
This has been In Different Color, a fairy tale.
Still hungry? See The Menu.