The Dreamwalker's Path

3/Main Street Market

Emelye suspected that she was about half way to the Hall of the Hours when the sky began to drop water on Sanctuary.

Emelye was not the only one who was surprised by the sudden onslaught of water, given the shrill cries of the people who were walking each side of an asphalt street, but she was the only one who seemed to have no place to head to in order to stay dry. She watched for several minutes as, one by one, the people disappeared under awnings that lead into apartments, scrambled down alleyways that lead to comfortable homes, and carefully climbed down slick staircases to their own front doors. But there was nowhere for Emelye to hide. She was more than half the city’s span away from the tiny bungalow that she and her parents lived in, and she had already spent the better portion of the last two days scampering around the city trying to find her way. Turning back now would undo all of the miles and blocks she had traveled today, and she was too close to her goal to consider what might happen if she stayed under the leaking sky.

So Emelye trudged onward, down the road and around the corner, until she reached what looked like a deserted market. What few booths were still active had been closed on account of the sky water, and they all looked like they were propped up against a large pile of rubble.

A man struggled with a large, oiled canvas, attempting to lay it across his table.

“Excuse me, sir,” Emelye said, clutching her bag carefully and approaching the man with caution. “Excuse me, but how far to the Hall of the Hours?”

The man garruph-ed and capphrumph-ed in her general direction. “Bit of a walk,” he told her distractedly. “Wouldn’t do it in the rain, though. You’d get your bones wet, the way this is settling in.”

Emelye looked around for some clue of what the man was talking about before it occured to her that he was talking about the sky water. “Oh,” she said when she understood. “Do you think it will rain for a very long time? I’m in a hurry, you see. I’ve got to meet Time and her Hours so I can find my parents.”

The man hardly paid her any attention now. He was muttering under his breath and pushing green-black braids away from his blue skin with more mutterings of disgust.

Emelye repeated her question.

“It’ll stop when it stops,” the man said gruffly. “Look, child, go home to yer mam and get out of the wet.” He scrubbed the top of her hair with a massive hand and the sort of passing affection that Emelye had seen her pa scrub a pup’s ears. Before she could protest, the man was lumbering off in the direction of his own home, leaving Emelye with her bag and the trussed up stalls, and the crumbled pile of stones.

“That was not very nice,” she said to the empty air as she watched the man go. “And he was not entirely helpful.”

Since the man was gone and Emelye had nowhere to go, she decided she had better take a good, hard look at her surroundings and find a dry place so she could figure out what to do next.

Emelye stared for several moments before realizing, quite suddenly, that she was looking at the remains of the clock tower.

The Hall of the Hours wasn’t very far from the clock tower, she knew, but the rain fell at an even heavier rate, and she was already soaked down to her skin. Without really knowing what she was going to do when she got there, the girl darted across the empty market place and circled around the ruins.

The clock tower still stood about three times as tall as she did in the lowest places, but no section was quite as high as the section of wall with the rusted ladder clinging to it. It didn’t look very stable, but maybe the high section and the lower walls would create a shield against the wind that brought the water down from the clouds.

Wiping her hair from her face, Emelye carefully crept up a small set of iron lattice stairs, trying not to be afraid when they shrieked in protest at the addition of her weight. The door had long been absconded with, Emelye suspected, if the empty hinges were anything to go by, but somehow she had the distinct impression that no one had been inside of the tower itself for quite a long while.

The Alchemist, Emelye suspected, had not been a very tidy person. Shelves half-hung on the walls inside the tower. Books and baubles lay scattered on the floor among pieces of broken furniture. Emelye imagined that her Ma wouldn’t be particularly impressed by the mess that the Alchemist seemed to have lived in. She imagined that her Ma would have told the Alchemist as much, too, right before giving him a broom and telling him to clean his room or he wouldn’t be allowed to do any magic for a week.

The image of her Ma making the Alchemist clean up his untidy house made the clock tower as a whole a little less frightening. Still, the little girl assured herself several times under her breath that the Alchemist was dead and gone and he would not eat her for sneaking into his clock tower. Then, taking a deep breath and pretending she was very brave, Emelye slipped between the gap that used to be a doorway and into the belly of the crumbling clock tower.

Running to the tower, she decided, had been a good idea. The highest wall blocked a good portion of the wind and water, and she circled around the inside of the tower so that she could stand in some of the drier patches that the high wall protected. She had to climb over a few pieces of rubble to get there, and once, she tripped, her hand landing on an old board and smashing through it. Her palm hit something sharp—the corner of a piece of furniture, it felt like, and when she pulled her hand out of the hole she had made, it was covered in blood.

Telling herself that she was very brave and that it didn’t hurt, really, Emelye bit her lip, shut her eyes tightly, and waited for a wave of water to spray her hand clean. It hurt and her eyes teared, but she knew it would be no use to cry. Ma said that crying only made injuries seem worse than they were. She didn’t have anything to wrap it with, but she imagined her mother telling her that the cut was quite shallow, Emmy-Leigh, and it would begin to heal soon.

When she opened her eyes and looked at her hand again, a soft glow caught her attention. At first she thought it was her hand itself, but she realized a moment later that it was something behind her hand, something from where she had fallen.

Peering into the hole her hand had made, she found a small music box like the one her Ma kept on her dresser. Curious, but not wanting to stay in the rain, she reached through the broken boards, grabbing the box carefully, and then held it tightly to her chest. She continued her journey to the other side of the clock tower.

Thankfully, she did not have to go quite as far as she thought she would: she spied a large wooden workstation tucked against the wall nearest her, and it seemed like a much better place to stay the night than perched under just a wall.

Carefully, Emelye made her way to the wall that the workstation was perched against. She braced herself against the coquina and brick as she crept over more broken pieces of this-and-that. When she finally reached the workstation, she dropped to her knees and crawled underneath. The wood was solid and heavy; despite the frequency and size of the water droplets falling from the sky, the space under the desk was dry as dry could be. It had a thick smell of wood, and in a few minutes time, it had begun to take in her body heat and push it back out at her, providing her with warmth as well as a dry place to sleep.

Now out of the wet, Emelye turned her attention to the music box. She opened it curiously, expecting it to make some sort of sound, like her Ma’s, but it was silent. It would have been too dark to see what was inside of it, but as it happened, a smooth, black stone, a little smaller than a chicken’s egg, was the source of the glow, and it lit up the other objects: a large diamond, a few sea shells, some items that Emelye wasn’t sure what to call.

I could sell these, she thought, and maybe buy Ma and Pa presents for when they come back.

It was a good idea, so she put the box in the empty side pouch of her leather bag. Then she sat with her back against the wood of the workbench and heaved a heavy, sleepy sigh.

She liked it under the workstation. It was an unlikely place to sleep, but it reminded her of home. Sometimes when she didn’t want to go to bed, her father put a blanket under his workstation and told her to sleep there. She didn’t have a blanket, but that was all right, it would only get wet anyway now that her clothes were wet.

What she did need, despite the possibility of it getting wet, was her Kitty.

Emelye pulled open the flap of her leather bag and dug through the contents carefully. Shirt. Skirt. Undies. Socks. Socks. Skirt...After coming across the same skirt three times and there still being no sight of Kitty, Emelye dumped her bag over and began to paw through everything again, putting each item back in the bag as she affirmed that it was not Kitty.

She did this twice before the tears began to gather in her eyes, and she began to hiccough and sniffle quietly.

I lost my Kitty! Her first sob was punctuated by the loudest, most angry sound that Emelye had ever heard, and the brightest flash of light. Her surprise and fear turned her sob into a hysterical shriek and she kicked at the wood of the workstation in fright.

Here she was: soaking wet, far from home, her kitty was gone, and the sky sounded like it was angry enough to kill. She wished she had gone home, wished her parents weren’t lost, wished that the sky could have refrained from doing whatever it was doing for at least another hour so she could have made it to the Hall of the Hours to see Time. Most of all she wished that she knew where her Kitty was, because if she had to be far from home, if her parents had to be lost, if she had to be stuck under an old workbench in the Alchemist’s clock tower, listening to the sky roar, and being cold and wet, if she had to endure all of that, she might at least have her Kitty to comfort her.

Now Kitty was gone. Now, if Time couldn’t get her parents back to her, there would be no way for her to remember them. They had made Kitty for her, and she had neglected Kitty, and now Kitty was as gone as they were.

Over and over she thought of how she should have checked to make sure Kitty was in her bag throughout the day. She should have held Kitty as she walked through the street instead of shoving him in the bag, right on top, where anyone could snatch him. She thought of the way Kitty’s paw would have squished and crinkled in her hand as the wood shavings that made him so cuddly crunched in her grip. She thought of how he would have smelt now, all dry, because the leather bag she carried had kept her things dry, and of her Pa’s work shop.

Where could she have left it? When could it have been taken from her? She had been so careful, she thought, to keep an eye on her bag. She had clutched it with both hands in the crowded areas of Sanctuary. She had taken Kitty out only once, and she had been sure to put Kitty away before... before...

But he’d come down the hall so quickly. She hadn’t wanted to get caught where she wasn’t supposed to be so she’d tucked him in the bag and ran...and he must have fallen out.

The Historian had her Kitty.

A wave of relief washed over her. He wouldn’t not give her Kitty back to her. She would just have to go back to the Temple and get it. If she had talked to him the way she had decided to in the first place, she wouldn’t have lost Kitty anyway. So maybe after she talked to Time, she could go back, get her Kitty, and then—

The sky rumbled again, but it sounded much farther away. In fact, everything seemed a lot farther away. The water, the wind, the workstation. It was like she had jumped into a pile of wood shavings without the itchy part. Somehow everything was muffled, far away.

And then very suddenly she was in a brightly lit room of black wood and red drapery, and it smelled of dust and old paper.

She found herself sitting on the floor in front of a low fancy table, and a brown leather chair with a high, sturdy back and big arms.

Any confusion that she might have felt at being one place and then suddenly in another was completely erradicated by the sight in front of yer: nestled in the corner of that big chair was a familiar, droopy, little body.

“Kitty!” She whispered the exclamation and scrambled to her feet so that she could climb over the table and into the chair. She picked up her kitty and hugged it to her, not caring that she was sopping wet and getting Kitty damp too. “I missed you so much,” she said. “I didn’t mean to leave you behind; I should have checked for you before I left again.”

“I’m certain he forgives you.”

The voice seemed to come from nowhere, and it made Emelye squeak. In a breath, she was out of the chair and heading for the nearest door, but a strong hand caught the back of her shirt.

“Wait a moment,” the voice bade, and Emelye looked over her shoulder to see the gaunt face of the Historian looking kindly down on her. “I’m not upset at you for being here; please, I’m glad you found your kitty, but it looks like you’ve been dumped in a fountain and kept in an ice box overnight. Wouldn’t you prefer to sit next to a warm fire with a cup of cocoa?” He smiled.

To be entirely honest, Emelye was not certain that smiling was a good look for the Historian. His skin was very thin looking, and it crinkled a little strangely around his immense eyes, which was strange, because it didn’t seem like there should have been enough skin on the man’s face to crinkle at all, let alone to crinkle so much for the sake of a smile.

And yet, for as frightening as that thin, bony face was, there was something in his expression that was comforting, too. So Emelye didn’t resist as he guided her back in the direction of the chair, his voice soothing as he added, “Perhaps I can help you find what you’re looking for.”