After the first hour of the presentation, there was a break. Garret made his way back to the tables at the back of the stone courtyard where the Devoted had coffee they had been boiling over the last hour and fried sweet breads they’d been frying in oil. Garret had decided to stay through the first half because of the delicious smells.
The Southerners he’d come in with were standing by the coffee, their eyes glazed over. “I’d never really given much thought on what I owed Ixis,” said the one with the blue feather in his hat. “I know,” said the one with the red. He took a sip of his coffee and grimaced. Garret shooed them out of they way and filled a clay mug with hot beverage. He was sliding down to the fried pastries when he saw a familiar face and nearly dropped his coffee.
“Mr. Garret,” Ms. Cariwyn said with a smile and a wave. “What a delight to see you again.”
“Same here,” Garret said, gravely. He nodded. Then a thought occurred to him. “I didn’t see you come in with the rest of the group. Are you one of the Devoted?”
She smiled sympathetically, sensing the low opinion he had of the group and his guilt at implying that she was a brainless fool. “And why not?” she asked gently.
“Yeah,” Garret said awkwardly, and then scanned the courtyard while he took a sip of his coffee. It was terrible. He turned back to her. “How’s your boy?”
She paused, then frowned. “Neville?” she said. “Well, I had a bit of a disturbing experience yesterday…” She trailed off, sounding as though she didn’t want to talk about it.
“What’s that?” Garret asked.
“I was walking by the window of a pawnbrokers and saw this.” She reached into a pocket and produced a pocket watch.
“Weird,” Garret said. “It looks just like the cursed one you had.”
“That was my thinking as well,” she said. “Imagine my surprise when I went in to examine it and found that it was, in fact, the exact same watch.”
“What? How is that possible? Nickel destroyed it.”
Ms. Cariwyn lifted her finger, indicating he should pay attention. When she had him, she placed the watch in her palm, turned her arm so that the watch was momentarily hidden from his view by the back of her hand, and when she finished turning the watch was gone.
Garret’s eyebrows went up. “How did you do that?”
“It’s a simple illusion, Mr. Garret. All it takes is practice.” She walked towards him and something in her smile, in her eyes, turned just a bit wicked. She placed her hands on his chest, then reached into the breast pocket of his coat and produced the watch. Standing close to him, her hands still on his chest, she spoke in a low voice. “I dreamt of you last night, Mr. Garret.”
This time only one of his eyebrows went up. “And?”
“You owe my husband an apology, to say the least.”
“Oh,” Garret said with a self-satisfied smirk, “you could have said a lot less than that. But I’m glad you didn’t.”
***
Nickel was in actual pain, now. He hadn’t realized that desire had a physical manifestation, and the idea intrigued him so that he made a mental note of it. Something to look into once he’d achieved the enlightenment promised by finishing the sequence of forms that the thread presented.
“Come on,” said the man with the long brown hair. “If you tell me what I want to know then I’ll do the next Cat’s Cradle form.”
“Nonsense,” said Nickel. “You’ve broken that promise too many times. You’ll actually have to take it before I say anything more.”
They were still in the grey room. The man sat in the chair opposite him, where Carolyn Cariwyn had sat a number of times as well. Nickel couldn’t help but snicker at the name, even when he said it in his head. Nickel still had the thin silver thread strung between his fingers in the intricate form of the Cat’s Cradle. It was a fascinate, he realized. He was a little embarrassed that it had taken him so long to figure it out. At the same time, no one had ever used one on him before. He had always thought his will was of a strength that such a charm wouldn’t work on him, but it wasn’t a matter of will at all. He still wanted to go to the next form, even though he knew there was no true enlightenment at the end of it. He wondered if the sensation was the same gnawing desire that was suffered by smokers of pillow-weed, and he decided that he would need to try the herb if he managed to make it out of the current situation alive.
Nickel assumed that the brown haired man suspected Nickel had figured out the nature of his predicament, and that was why he wouldn’t take the thread into the next form as Ms. Cariwyn had done. The brown haired man was right in this. If he did take the thread, Nickel intended to kill him.
The brown haired man rubbed his chin.
“Tomas!” someone called from the other room. The brown haired man turned towards the call, glanced back at Nickel briefly, then stood and walked out through the doorway.
Nickel tried to force his own body to stand. At the first shift in his weight, though, he saw the thread start to slip and panic welled up inside him. He stopped moving and cursed himself for being so weak-minded, even though he knew that weak-mindedness wasn’t the cause.
Tomas came back into the room with a great smile on his face. “Well,” he said, sitting. “You’ll have a visit from a good friend in just a moment. I’m delighted about this.”
Looking at Tomas, Nickel thought of a way out of the fascinate. “Tomas,” he said, calling the man’s attention. Tomas turned and looked at him. Nickel caught his gaze and held it. Then Nickel began to speak in a voice that was different than his own:
“In the mind of every person is a mirror, Tomas. A receiver, a repeater. So that when you see me move my head, inside you there is a small part that thinks about the feeling of your own head moving.” As Nickel said this he rotated his head and Tomas did the same, never breaking eye contact.
Nickel continued: “When you hear my voice, a part of you hears your own.”
Tomas spoke the same words, just a split second behind Nickel.
Nickel slowly lifted his hands and Tomas did the same. Nickel said his final lines, “And if the connection becomes strong enough, like lovers we begin to move as one.”
At this, Tomas reached out and pinched the thread, shifting it into the next form.
Freed, Nickel stood. He thought for a moment about searching Tomas for a knife so that he could kill him. Or even just choking him. But Nickel knew he had to get away from thefascinate while he could. He was strenuously avoiding looking at it and he knew it would be dangerous to even think about it any more than he already had done. He turned and marched towards the door, wiping the blood from his nose with the back of his hand. He pushed the half-fallen door aside and immediately was stopped by an imposing wall of flesh. He looked up. “Hello, Garret,” he said.
Garret’s eyes were glazed over, but his brows were pinched together fervently. He absent-mindedly held a mug of coffee and a bit of sweetened fried dough in his hands. “Nickel,” Garret growled. “Ms. Cariwyn tells me you’ve put your soul in harms way and are resisting the grace of our sweet dreamer, the only savior: Ixis. She’s asked me to give you the word, no matter what it takes.”
“Scab-rats,” Nickel muttered under his breath.
Garret took a sip of coffee, then stuck the fried bread in his mouth and used his freed hand to reach out for Nickel.
