5

The rest of the dinner guests began to dismount from the table, and they formed a small mob, moving intently toward Mallory. There was something different about the way they were looking at her this time—their eyes reminded Mallory of Alex’s when she was standing on her kitchen counter, twitching slightly. Fear, panic, anxiety, negativity oozed from the group, and Mallory felt real fear for her safety. She tensed her muscles, preparing to flee back out the door.

The Matriarch suddenly pushed her way to the front of the crowd and turned to address them. She was covered with blood from the woman still lying on the ground moaning, so the crowd stood back from her, visibly aghast. She wiped her bloody hands on a napkin while she spoke: “Now, everyone stop! Let’s find out what’s going on before we do something that cannot be undone.” For Mallory, having the Matriarch for a mother was like watching two different people living inside one person. One kissed her knee when she skinned it as a child; the other commanded the citizens into action and demanded respect, but it was not always easy to know who Mallory was dealing with in the moment. With the crowd aroused against her, Mallory was happy that these two roles her mother inhabited could coexist at times.

The crowd halted before the Matriarch’s rebuke, and Mallory’s fear dissipated a little when her mother turned to her and asked, “Mallory, what is going on? Did you do something tonight? Something that might have caused the Dikaió not to work the way it ought?”

 

Mallory fidgeted at the sight of her mother looking like a butcher just come from the slaughterhouse. Her hands were now clean, and Mallory watched her mother reach up and pin a few stray hairs, which had broken loose and curled, back into place. Her mother’s ability to know when even one of those brown locks strayed always perplexed Mallory. Could she feel them break free from her control? Her mother looked intently at Mallory with her piercing blue eyes, waiting for an answer. Mallory provided her standard answer with more confidence than she felt, “Well, I didn’t do anything per se. Alex was the one who—”

 

Her mother did not blink. They had had this conversation countless times over the years. “But you know what happened?”

 

“I don’t know . . . maybe . . .”

 

The leader of the Smith Guild yelled from behind the Matriarch, “I knew it. That girl has been a bane to the city from the day that old witch of a Matriarch cursed her.”

 

Mallory’s mother moved like a viper strike. In an instant, she was standing over the fat little man, glaring with powerful intent, “Watch your tongue, Jules. That is my family you’re speaking of with so much carelessness.” He shrunk away from her but looked ready to answer back until she added, “We have no idea what the state of the Dikaió is. Your words might very well still cause irreparable damage.”

The Governor stepped up then and added, “Quite right, Sarai! Until we investigate and figure out exactly what has happened, we must continue to live as if nothing has changed. But if this girl has done something to the Dikaió, we need to figure it out tonight. The city is vulnerable without the Dikaió.”

The Administrator spoke then, “And we must also consider justice and assess damages that have occurred. We’ll have to see if anyone has been hurt, and who is at fault.”

The Matriarch acquiesced, “Of course, we have much to investigate and discuss, but becoming a mob is hardly going to accomplish any of those things, will it? Neither will justice be served by rushing to administer punishments before the facts have been investigated; don’t you agree that could also do harm, James?”

The old Administrator smoothed the collar of his uniform and said, “Of course, Sarai. You sound so much like your mother when you’re acting the mother hen. You know very well the city’s court is fair.”

“Thank you, James.” The Matriarch waved away his comment about her mother. It was no secret the Administrator and Mallory’s grandmother had been political rivals ever since the old woman gave Mallory the wrong christening. Her mother did not give him an opportunity to respond either way. “I suggest we convene the Council.”

The head of the Smith Guild muttered, “I don’t see what the Council has to do with it—the girl admitted she’s behind it.” He turned to the Administrator, “We demand justice!”

The Administrator looked down at the man, “You heard the Matriarch. We don’t even know what has happened. How can justice be served without the facts? Should the facts reveal the heir of the Matriarchy is at fault, then we shall have justice.”

Other voices began to chime in from the group, offering suggestions and demanding solutions.

Mallory was edging backward toward the door while they argued amongst themselves. Then she felt a strong arm wrap around her shoulders; she startled and turned to see her father pulling her into an embrace. She briefly saw the stretched lines of worry she had chiseled into his face with her adventures over the years, but he still smiled his infectious smile only dads seem to manage in difficult situations—the sort of look that dads seem to get even in the midst of the most pernicious danger; like if they were dangling over a pit of spears waiting to impale them, they would offer some silly pun like, “Why is grass dangerous? Because it’s full of blades.” There were no silly jokes tonight though, and Mallory’s father just smiled gently and hugged her knowingly. When she was close, he whispered in her ear, “Oh, my girl. My girl.”

Mallory just cried. What else could she do?

The din of the crowd was becoming feverish, and finally the Governor shouted, “Enough! We will convene the Council and investigate before any decisions will be made. This conversation is over.” He turned to Alex’s father and said, “Daniel, Mallory said Alex was involved in this. We’ll need her here for the investigation. You and Charisse go home and round her up.” The Chief Magistrate nodded and took his wife’s arm heading out the door.  The crowd mulled around a bit in silence after the Chief Magistrate left, but then those not on the Council noticed the Governor’s stern glare and began to collect their belongings to leave.

The Matriarch turned away from the chaos of the dinner guests’ exit to her husband and daughter; she seemed surprised by the scene of fatherly tenderness, and for a moment the Matriarch retreated before the mother. Her face contorted in concern, but she shook her head and stammered, “Mallory, you’re a mess. Why don’t you go change out of those clothes, and then we’ll talk about what happened?”

Mallory looked up at her father with a bid for help and saw in his helpless expression there was nothing he could do. She did not wait to be asked twice and raced past her mother, the assembly, and up the stairs, taking them two at a time lest anyone below should change their mind and call her back. She got to her room and shut the door as quickly as she could. She leaned back up against the door. It was ice cold. It clung to her, freezing her skin at every point of contact, and only then did she realize how truly soaked the storm had left her. She looked down and saw a puddle of water spreading on the polished wooden planks below her feet. She wondered if her father was now as soaked as she was? He had not even seemed to notice that she was a sodden mess when he embraced her, nor seemed to care once he had her in his arms. Her heart swelled first with love then guilt and regret. What they had done would hurt her father. It would hurt her mother as well. Maybe the whole city. They had never considered there might be consequences for anyone other than themselves.

She pried herself free from the door and began to pull off her inundated clothing. The wet clothes had a mind of their own though, and they were determined to stay on her. She fought and struggled, releasing one side of clinging cloth from her body only to have the other side suck up against her skin again. Eventually she zigged and zagged and tugged each article of clothing off, dropping them into the puddle on the floor. She dressed quickly, and even the dry clothes rebelled somewhat against the dampness of her skin, but once she powered past the friction, she panted from cold and exertion.

The warm coziness of dry clothes seemed to sap every ounce of energy from her body, and she collapsed onto her bed in exhaustion. Laying there staring at the ceiling, her eyelids were lead anchors pulling a fishing line below the waves of the comforter she was sinking into. The gravity of comfort and exhaustion pulled her down further and further. Her arms and legs were dead weights, and her breathing was becoming more and more even as she lay there. The ceiling lights, barely seen through slits in her eyelids, were surrounded by fading rainbows, spiraling around them like moths flying too close to their flames.  What was happening was more important than sleep, but she thought if she just closed her eyes, rested for a moment, she would be better prepared to face her mother’s interrogation. So, Mallory curled into a fetal position, and sleep embraced her as fully as her father’s arm had earlier. In her unconscious escape, she felt safe. And she enjoyed that feeling because exhaustion kept dreams at bay for a time. But as rest alleviated the exhaustion, there was a stirring of a quiescent fancy in her slumber: nothing substantial like images or actions, just a sensation of a conflicting urgent peace. Soon a voice emanated from the sensation. It was unintelligible at first, but as she strained her dormant self to hear, she could make out a familiar word:

“Mallory!”

Someone far away was calling her name now.

“Mallory!”

The tinny voice sounded like it was coming from deep in a tunnel, but it was drawing nearer.

“Mallory!”

She recognized it now. It was her mother, and she was coming closer, but it was so dark, Mallory could not find her, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to.

“Mallory!”

The ground shifted, and Mallory felt a twinge of fear. Her eyes blinked open to find her mother standing over her, tugging on her pillow. Mallory recoiled and tried to scoot away. Her mother looked at her with a tenderness that Mallory had not seen since she was a small child, sat down on the bed beside her, and stroked her hair, looking thoughtfully into Mallory’s eyes. She began to hum a wordless hymn, and Mallory felt the fear subside. She snuggled up into her mother’s lap and let herself be petted. After a while, Mallory began to think she must have been having a nightmare about Alex and the Dikaió, and she had called out, and her mother was there to calm her down. “I’ll be okay, Mom. Good night.” She slowly began to drift back to sleep, but then her mother stopped stroking her hair.

“Mallory, my dear girl, I know it’s late, but the Council is downstairs waiting. I need you to come with me and tell them what you know about what happened to the Dikaió.”

It was not a dream then. Mallory sighed deeply into her mother’s lap then raised herself, straightened her clothes, and headed toward the door. She briefly noted that a sprite was holding her wet clothes while drying the floor with towels from the bathroom. Her mother gave the servant a wide berth, looking at it with a mixture of disgust and perhaps a hint of fear. Seeing her mother’s expression started Mallory’s stomach churning again, only this time it was fear and trepidation chasing each other through the gurgling pit in her abdomen. If her mother was afraid, how much worse would the City Council be? What would they do to her when they found out that all of this was her fault? What would they do to Alex? Mallory walked slowly down the stairs holding firmly to the handrail lest her emotions best her and she fall. Her mother followed closely behind, gripping the handrail as firmly as Mallory.

The City Council sat around the Knenne family table. Apparently, this business was too urgent to convene in the assembly room at City Hall where they usually met, and Mallory supposed since they had all been there already for the dinner party, there was little reason to leave. Mallory looked to her right and saw Caleb sitting in one of the high wing-backed chairs with his mother in the living area. They were likely waiting for the Governor to finish before daring to walk home on a night as unpredictable as this one. Caleb looked at Mallory as she walked by, and she could tell he knew exactly what had happened. His silent, “Why?” took an emotional toll larger than anything else Mallory had experienced that night, and she stumbled slightly on the corner of a rug and would have fallen if her mother was not holding tightly to her arm.

There were two empty seats at the long table on each end. The Matriarch led her daughter to the nearest one and indicated that her daughter should sit, then she moved around the table and took her seat between the Governor and the Administrator, representing the familial Triad of Leadership. The Council was made up of the four Dikaió Elect, who were elected officials that represented the will of the people and rotated every four years; they looked very self-important, worried but also excited to be part of such important business as what was happening tonight. The rest of the Council included the representatives of the six Dikaió guilds of the city: the head of the Dikaió Mercantile Guild (and she was meticulously groomed and dressed in the finest, latest fashion); her older sister, the Head of the Dikaió Science Guild, who had gray hair pulled back in a tight bun and wore thick glasses, as she scribbled busily in a ragged red notebook; the Manager of the Dikaió City Services Guild, a large, muscular man dressed in clean overalls (a rarity in his line of work); the Head of the Co-op of the Dikaió Culture Guild sat picking dirt from his fingernails, looking quite amused at all the commotion; the Sprite Master of the Dikaió Sprite Guild, a middle-aged woman with bright red hair, fidgeting endlessly with a fork that the sprites had failed to collect from her; and finally, of course, there was the decorated head of the Dikaió Smith Guild, who was watching Mallory with cold, buggy eyes. In fact, he was the only Council Member that had even acknowledged Mallory as she sat down, and he was like an old lion raging inside a cage, ready to tear her limb-from-limb if he could just be given the chance. She looked quickly away from him and focused her attention on the Matriarch who was firmly in her leadership persona, peering across the table at Mallory with severity.

The Matriarch nodded toward Mallory, “Okay, Mallory. Tells us what happened.”

Mallory hesitated. She did not want to betray the secret of Book Club and have these adults destroy the treasure trove of books they had collected, even if they might be able to find answers to the current situation in those very books. She decided to test the waters of telling her story by starting with, “Well, Alex and I found a book.”

Immediately, the table erupted in angry chatter. Books! Will there be no end to their danger?! I thought they were destroyed! This is what comes from letting anyone learn to read! Meddlesome children always finding books; it will be the death of us all!

That cinched Mallory’s resolve. She would not be telling anyone about Book Club tonight. She’d focus on the one book that caused the trouble. If they destroyed it, then it would be just as well given the trouble it had caused so far. But she could not bear the loss of losing all their books. She waited to continue until murmuring died down, and Mallory could tell that her mother across the table had been watching her very closely during the excitement. She sensed that she was biting the corner of her lip. Her mother would see that she was planning something, so she would know if she were lying or concealing something. Mallory decided to stick as closely to the truth as possible to throw her off the scent. Hopefully, she would think the planning was just nerves. “Yes, well actually, Alex found the book. She said it had the words to undo the curse of my Dikaió, and she wanted to help me become the Matriarch.”

The Matriarch stopped her, “Mallory, doesn’t Alex know that you are in line to be the Matriarch already?”

“Well, yes.” Mallory began to bite her lip again on purpose this time, “but she said that I would lose my title to my sister.”

The Matriarch squirmed as the attention shifted across the table to her, and she would not meet Mallory’s eye across the span. The murmuring had begun again and was growing louder. Clearly not all the Council Members were aware of her mother’s pregnancy and the chance for a functioning Matriarch to hold the position. Is it true? Will we have a true Matriarch? One that can bestow the Dikaió in the christening? How long have you known? When were you going to inform the Council? When is the future Matriarch to be born?

“Ladies and Gentleman,” the Governor shouted over the commotion. “This all seems irrelevant with the current state of the Dikaió, doesn’t it? Please, let’s continue our investigation. We will discuss news of the Matriarch’s second daughter at another time. Miss Knenne, continue.”

Mallory stopped trying to catch her mother’s eye, when it became evident that she could not look at her daughter. Satisfied that the search for concealment was over, Mallory began talking again: “Well, Alex said that unless I become a Dikaió Syntec tonight, my sister would become the Matriarch . . . and I didn’t know where that would leave me. She thought she had found the answer in this book: a way to end my Dikaió as a Chorus and reinstate it as a Syntec. I was hesitant, but I’m barely acknowledged as a person in this city as it is, so I figured what did I have to lose? Alex said the words. Nothing happened. I didn’t feel any different. My object of affection did not come when I called, nothing.” Mallory paused and looked at the Council.

Then the Science Guild leader said, “So the experiment was a failure?”

Mallory sagged, “Well, I don’t know. It depends if we understood the words right or not.”

The Head of the Smiths yelled, “And what does that mean? What happened that you’re not saying?”

“Well, nothing happened to me, but when Alex called my object of affection, tried to turn on the Dikaió torch, or command the kitchen sprites, nothing happened for her either. It was like she was a Chorus like me. We were on our way here to find help, but then when we got here, we found all of you were the same as Alex.”

There was silence as the implications began to settle over the Council.

Alex’s grandfather, the Administrator spoke first, “And where is Alex, now?”

“I don’t know. We walked in, saw the mess here, and when I turned around, she was gone.”

“And the book?”

“I don’t know. Alex had it.”

Thunder crashed then, the lights flared bright, and the room was swallowed in darkness. In the unrelenting black, the murmuring Council shifted from anger and outrage to fear. Someone in the room was shouting, “Dikaió torch, on,” but the room remained in darkness only briefly illuminated by flashes of lightning shining through the living area windows. Bodies bumped ungraciously into one another, as they all stumbled toward the living area. Mallory tried to stay upright amongst the throng of City Council members, but she nearly fell several times.

When they made it to the living area, there was still no light save the flashes of lightning. The streetlights were all out, so even the outdoors was nearly black.

“What’s that sound?” Someone in the darkness spoke. The room went silent, and then Mallory heard it. It sounded like someone had opened a bag of marbles and dropped them all down a metal shoot. Or like a bunch of rocks being shaken in a tin can. Or like water sprinkling, mostly like water sprinkling, and that’s when she pressed through the crowd to the window. She pressed her face up to the glass and looked up toward the sky. Darkness. The rain was no longer causing the pink arcs of lightning in the skies above the city, and all of it was now pouring through unhindered. The light over the city had gone out when the houselights did.

The Governor’s voice sounded above the commotion, “The generators for the light and the city are below City Hall. We need to get there in order to get the light back up.”

“How?” A voice asked. “Without the Dikaió, how do we reactivate the generators?”

The Governor did not respond. Instead, he called out, “C’mon, Jacob. Let’s go see what we can do.” Jacob Carpenter, the large City Services Manager grunted an acknowledgement, and the Governor yelled, “Caleb! Come with us, son. We may need your help.”

Caleb shoved his way through the crowd, and Mallory briefly felt him push by her, and even in the midst of the crisis and trouble she found herself in, she still felt the hair on her arms raise at his touch. The Governor, the City Services Manager, and Caleb felt their way to the door and then flung it open, inviting the wind and rain into the house. The whole crowd then began to shuffle out into the storm and follow behind the Governor toward City Hall. Mallory was drawn along with them, as much by curiosity about what could be done to resurrect the light as by not wanting to be left alone in the dark house. The Governor did not dissuade the crowd from following them. Mallory figured he was used to the attention.

The water that hit Mallory as they exited the house was not the gentle mist of raindrops a storm usually passed through the light. This was a deluge of water. They were all instantly soaked. The streets had streams of water rushing through them, and more than one Council Member was pulled off their feet into the current and had to be rescued by the others, groping for them in the dark, their eyes still barely able to make out anything in the darkness. The floods made it slow going to City Hall, but the group trudged on.

Then lightning flashed down to the Earth, instantly followed by a clap of thunder so loud, that Mallory felt her heart skip a beat. As if by a miracle, when she opened her eyes, there was a soft glow of light, and she could make out some details of the people and the city around her. The light was weak and flickering, but at least it was light, and the group seemed to pick up speed now that they could see where they were going. In fact, soon they were all running. Then they were shouting as well. Panicked, Mallory saw what had excited the group and what had brought the light in the darkness: Lightning had struck City Hall, and the building was a black silhouette outlined by a small pillar of fire extending toward the heavens from its roof. Despite the heavy rains, the fire was spreading quickly through the wood-framed building.