SSCS 03: Installment 8 of 35
Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
This is Installment 8 of this year’s SSCS. If you want to start at the beginning of ‘Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About’, go here! If you want to know what the heck an SSCS is, go here!
Previously…
Those hands were meant to go around a lantern. I could see the shape of where it wasn’t yet and had started yesterday, very clumsily, to try to mold out the form of it on the sand-table for Lily or Elka’s surely horrified inspection today. I needed a good straight-edge, and maybe a welding torch. My hands didn’t know how to shape things with just soft fingertips alone. And I had decided I wasn’t going to think yet about what the center of the tablet – what would be the center of both the front and back of the bell – would hold. I could tell I wasn’t ready to see that yet.
…Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
Installment 8: 19.0814
***
“You’ve started, have you? I thought we told you to wait.”
Elka’s rusty voice was a crack in my ear, and I came to standing perched up on a stool in front of my tablet, reaching high to set a mark point in the very top center. There was a long bamboo rod leaning against the side of the stool that I knew I was going to need next, with a not-entirely-heavy but still solid peg of wood lying in front of it for pounding. The dusty surface of the bell-template was right in front of my face, and I blinked at it, knowing in my center it needed to be sectioned into quadrants – or more than that – but not knowing why. When I lowered my hand from marking I realized it was throbbing from blisters and cuts, and the other one was too; I’d had to break apart one of the bamboo screens to get my rod and peg.
“I’m not…” I pressed my lips together before I could say ‘done’. My head was suddenly swimming, and I wobbled on the stool, starting to fall backward. Strong hands caught at my shoulder and elbow, helping me step down slowly. I didn’t realize it was Lily until she gave a startled ‘Oh!’ when she brushed one of my hands, making us both flinch back at the same moment.
“Jack! Salve please,” Lily called, before making sure I was steady and then taking a half-step away. I was busy looking at the cuts on my hands and feeling them shake, so I don’t know what her face looked like, either then or when she turned to look at the mess I’d made on the sand table. “Oh,” she said again, “that’s…”
“Not very well proportioned,” Elka finished for her. “But maybe… Sacrifice girl!” The crone whipped around and glared at me, ignoring the ‘Jhanni’ correction supplied by the other woman. Her tunic was indigo, like mine, but so old it was almost black, and seemingly disguised as grey by the fine powdering of dust that was everywhere in this workshop. “You’re supposed to be able to shape things proper. Are they trying to get us killed outright by sending us a dreamer with lumps for fingers? Speak!”
I sneezed. Then winced when that made my hands hurt more, and then again when I looked over at the sand table and had a good look at what I’d been trying to shape there. A moment ago, I thought I’d been trying to make the lantern I’d started yesterday look proper… I could still feel the frustration of the sand not going the way it ought to. “I need tools,” I said. “Something straight. Something to cut and measure. My hands are used to building things, not…” I waved them up in front of me, though gently this time.
Elka glared at me some more, eyes black as that most ancient indigo, the night. But then she just nodded once, and turned on her heel, and stumped away around one of the screens.
When she’d gone, Lily sighed and looked at me with her head tilted a bit sideways. She nodded her chin to the huge tablet surface now looming at my back. “Have you dreamed what it’s meant to be already?” she asked.
I paused, feeling the weight of it behind me, then I shook my head, managing not to shudder. “Not…yet.” I didn’t tell her about the building-sinking Fish I could now picture so clearly, lurking half-done behind my left shoulder. Maybe they’d want to kill us all for this bell no matter what. Or maybe a gate facing the river could only be expected to welcome horrors.