Mallory’s arm itched, and there was little she could do to alleviate the sensation. It felt like she had a brood of mosquitos living under her cast. Of course, this was not the case, but still the description seemed apt for the arm’s constant demand for the taste of a nail scraping skin. All the city was bemoaning the lack of luxury in using the Dikaió, but Mallory just wanted to scratch the persistent itch just out of reach. It is the little pleasures in life that get missed most when they are gone.
Over the last six weeks, she had tried to scratch away the itching in a multitude of ways. First, she tried to lever her other hand’s fingers down the chasm of the cast, but she could not get further than the bottom of the nailbed. Then she had wrangled silverware away from the kitchen sprites and wiggled forks and knives down inside her cast, which managed to reach down about four inches or so into the cast and at least rub the itchy spots, but it was not as effective as she had hoped, and she had trouble gripping the edge of the silverware the further down she went. She had lost a butter knife into her cast at one point and spent an hour dancing around her room shaking her broken arm like a monkey trying to dislodge it. Finally, she had tried using sticks dropped from the massive oaks in her front yard. These proved the most effective at getting down into the cast and scratching away the irritation. They were not smooth like the silverware, and the friction created by the rough bark was near enough to a fingernail that Mallory had achieved a modicum of relief. While she knew she ought to be figuring out a solution to bring back magic, Mallory had become more and more distracted by the itch in her cast, and she was spending most of her time sitting on her porch scratching her arm with twigs, which she felt were quite a bit like magic in terms of the relief she felt in using them. She had put together a varied collection of these sticks, each with a different arc and degree of bumps and crevices that could reach specific parts of her arm in the caverns of the cast, and with them, she drove back the insanity by fighting off the itch.
She wished she had her sticks with her right then. It was a hot day, and she could feel sweat inside the cast, trickling down her arm toward her hand. The sweat drops’ slow crawl tickled the nerve endings in her skin, causing the dreaded itch to rear up. She did not have access to her sticks because she was trekking up Main Street toward the hospital. On the positive side of the issue, this was the day she would get the cursed cast cut off her arm. On the negative side of the issue, the more her arm itched the slower the trek seemed to take. And worse, it was not just the itching that slowed her progress; it was market day again, and the whole city was out gathering groceries.
Main Street was lined with citizens buying food from the vendors. Grocery boxes hovered above their families waiting patiently for the citizens to deposit fruits, vegetables, milk, cheese, and all the usual assortment of edible necessities. Mallory thought that it would be easy to assume it was just a normal day at the market, the same as it always was, if the place was not so eerily quiet: No merchants were calling out for customers. No customers were haggling over price. Everyone on the street kept their head low, and their mouths shut. Mallory’s explanation to the nurse six weeks ago that someone had used the Dikaió carelessly had spread through the city, and that a slip of the tongue had brought this curse on them all resulted in a city in silence. It was better that everyone said as little as possible; words could hurt others. A few looked hatefully at Mallory as she passed by, knowing that she was involved somehow, but no one dared to say anything. Instead, they picked up their produce, paid vendors, and went down the line in brooding silence.
Another oddity that stood out as being different from the days of the Dikaió was that, while the grocery boxes were hovering in place about three feet above their families as usual, the boxes refused to come down and collect the groceries that had been purchased. On the first market day after the Dikaió ended, the head of the Dikaió Cultures Co-op had climbed up on one of the stalls and jumped up to grab his family’s grocery box. It shot up into the air, hauling the man upward six more feet before he fell. When he landed on the street, he shattered his left ankle, and while he screamed, the grocery box floated back down to hover three feet above him again. The grocery boxes apparently wanted to keep their distance, and no one tried to wrangle them out of the sky again. All the families carried their groceries home in their arms that week, and many ran out of food before the next market day came.
Foreseeing the issue, Caleb had Mallory come to his house to show him how to build one of her carts. All of her tools had been fashioned out of images in the books, and since he had to do most of the work with Mallory’s arm out of commission, most of the time was spent teaching him how to use a hammer and a saw. Once he understood the concepts, Caleb took to craftsmanship like a bird to air. He quickly added the two legs Mallory had wanted to add to the first model, so it stayed up when it was set down, balancing on the wheel up front and the two legs in the back, and he marveled at the improvement the addition had made.
The next day he came back with fifty men and women from the city and showed them the cart.
“Thank you all for coming,” he said. “You remember Miss Knenne’s grocery cart?”
The crowd all squirmed silently, afraid to say anything, but looking from the cart to Mallory with trepidation and confusion. Caleb had referred to her formally instead of using her first name as he usually did. Mallory was not sure what to think about that, but for the moment, she decided not to dwell on it. The Sprite Master, Reddy, had recovered quite quickly after being Mallory’s hospital roommate, but found herself without a lot to do after leaving the hospital. She broke the silence, “Yes, we remember it. Why wouldn’t we? It was an evil omen of what was coming that day.”
Caleb was undaunted. “Well, if we want to make sure people are able to take enough food home with them during the market days, we need to use Miss Knenne’s old magic to make one of these carts for every family in the city.”
The small crowd gasped when they realized what he was suggesting. There were roughly 500,000 people in the city, and the average family had five or six people living in their home. So, Caleb was suggesting that they needed roughly 100,000 carts. Another member of the crowd, a middle-aged citizen that Mallory thought was a baker or a café owner yelled, “Even if we wanted to do what you ask, there’s so few of us.” He looked around the crowd and then marveled, “Plus, none of us are qualified as Dikaió builders. Well, except the Dikaió Sprite Master here.”
“There isn’t any more magic to craft with, Louis,” Caleb retorted. “None of you currently have a job within the city without the Dikaió to aid in your work. But at least for now the culture sprites are continuing in their day-to-day farming duties, so the food production is still running. If we can get this food delivery system up and running, then at least one of the city’s basic needs will be met, and then we can figure out how to use the old magic to get your vocations back into working order.”
“Why aren’t you spending your time figuring out how to get the Dikaió back?” Someone questioned from the back.
Caleb nodded solemnly. “Restoring the Dikaió is an important priority, which is why the City Council is working toward that end, except for the Sprite Master. We’re going to need her help with this project. I’ve been assigned the task to make sure the city gets enough to eat. Now, let me show you how to build one of these things.”
Caleb gave a brief description of the tools and the concept of the cart, and he set a few of the citizens to hammering and sawing lumber he’d pulled out of some abandoned sheds on the Governor’s property. When he seemed confident that the group knew what they were doing, Mallory pulled him aside. “We’re going to need more than wood, Caleb.” Mallory picked up a rusty bolt out of a small pile near her foot. “It took me years to find these materials, scrounging through junk piles and old sheds around the city. In order to make so many carts, you’re going to need tens of thousands of wheels, bolts, and nails. Where are we going to find those?”
Caleb smiled and called to the Sprite Master, “Reddy, can you come here for a moment?” Caleb held up a wheel, a nail, and a bolt for her to see. “Since we don’t need more sprites at the moment, do you think your guild could make these?”
The Sprite Master brushed a few loose red hairs out of her eyes and took the nail and bolt from Caleb, turning them over and over in her hands, studying their design carefully. “Well, I have not been to the Sprite Rookery since we lost the Dikaió because of my injuries, but without the Dikaió, I am sure it is a mess.” She looked coldly at Mallory and then addressed Caleb when continuing, “I think we could make wax molds out of these then slip by the forge sprites that are still keeping the fires hot, syphon off some of the molten steel, and set up a manual assembly line for them.” She picked up one of the wheels, “Wheels, we have a lot of. There are a lot of unjoined sprite wheels laying around. You are welcome to them.”
“We’re going to need tens of thousands,” Mallory chimed in.
The Sprite Master looked her in the eye and then shrugged in reply, holding her hands out wide in a half-curtsy: “You’re welcome to all we have.”
Mallory could not quite tell if she was mocking her or actually being courteous, but she was pretty certain it was the former and not the latter. She was puffing up her chest to say something she would likely regret, but Caleb started barking orders, interrupting the near confrontation between the women: “Okay, Reddy, you and Miss Knenne and four men come with me. We’re going to go see if we can fetch some wheels.” He looked around the crowd. “I need twenty of you to head out around the city and collect as many useable, intact boards like these that you can find.” He pointed at the stack of wood he’d hauled out for the construction project. “Meanwhile, the rest of you need some more of these tools constructed, and you should start putting together as many carts as you can with the materials we’ve got here.”
The Sprite Master looked at the tools and said, “We could probably scrap some of the sprite parts at the Rookery and build some of these rudimentary tools as well.”
Caleb nodded, “That would be very helpful. Thank you, Reddy. Okay, folks. Let’s get to work. Market day is fast approaching, and I would like to get as many of these carts into the hands of families in the city as we can.”
Caleb, Mallory, and the group heading to the Rookery took the two finished carts and started out. It was a long hike to the Rookery; it was just past the hospital at the edge of the city, near the pastureland where the Dikaió Cultures kept the cattle and the sheep. Mallory was walking behind the group, the pain in her arm was significant with all the jostling of a long hike, and even though it was daylight, this walk up Main Street dragged up memories of that night hauling Alex to the hospital. She tried to distract herself by making a mental list of how much material they were going to need to construct a cart for every family in town. “I don’t think these carts will hold enough wheels,” she called ahead to the group.
No one acknowledged her or even looked in her direction. When she thought about it, almost no one had spoken to her since she had left the hospital. She could understand the regular citizens that were afraid of careless words, but even those that knew what had really happened and that their words were no longer dangerous without the Dikaió were ignoring her. Her own mother and father had barely uttered four words to her since she came home from the hospital. They were both very busy trying to keep the city running, but there were certainly times in the morning when they were getting ready that they could have stopped to check on her. It seemed to Mallory that her father wanted to, but his rule was to always choose his wife’s side over his daughter’s in any argument, whether he really agreed with the Matriarch or not.
“Mallory,” he would say, “one day, you’re going to grow up, find some boy to marry, and leave us, and then all your mother and I will have left is each other. We need to be a united front all the time, so we can stay united in our old age. Do you understand?”
Mallory did not.
In fact, Caleb was the only one talking to her regularly at all, but at that moment, he was too busy talking logistics with Reddy at the head of the procession to hear her comment, which she thought was important—certainly more important than whatever that impertinent Sprite Master was talking to him about. Mallory felt irritated and half-walked, half-ran, trying to keep her broken arm from jostling too much but still wanting to catch up with Caleb. She finally caught up to him just as the Sprite Master was saying, “I’m not sure these two carts will hold enough wheels to be much use.” Mallory slowed to a walk and glared daggers at the redheaded woman.
Caleb shrugged in the carefree way he always had about him and replied, “Well, sure I don’t expect to fill these two carts with 10,000 wheels. I figure we’ll fit as many as we can to complete the carts the others are working on, then maybe we’ll come back with twenty carts, and then two-hundred, etcetera—a sort of exponential collection of materials if you will.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to just move all the production into the Rookery?” Mallory asked.
Caleb glanced over his shoulder and smiled, “I thought about that, but if the Dikaió does come back, there’s a lot of damage that’s been inflicted by its absence that could use sprites for repair, so I think leaving the Rookery ready for that influx is the best strategy.”
The Sprite Master nodded in agreement.
But Mallory bit her lip and thought a moment before responding, “And if the Dikaió doesn’t return, we’ll have wasted hours of labor and resources trekking across the city for materials.”
Caleb shrugged again, “Maybe, but for now that’s the plan, Ms. Knenne. If we need to change it later, we will.”
“Who’s plan?” Mallory was feeling irritated being left out of the city’s discussions, and the more Caleb called her ‘Ms. Knenne,’ the more she wanted to punch him in the eye. At least for now, she was still heir to the Matriarchy.
Caleb paused and turned around to reply to Mallory, so Reddy stopped and turned too. The Sprite Master looked nearly as red as her hair and looked like she was ready to strangle Mallory. Caleb’s deep blue eyes were downcast. “Look,” he said. “It’s nothing personal, but—”
His sentence was cut off by one of the four citizens that had come with them urgently whispering, “What is that?”
Mallory looked back at the citizens behind them. One was pointing off to the right, and she followed his gaze. He was looking at the Rookery, which they had managed to get within one-hundred and fifty yards of while they were talking. Behind the building, just beyond the pastures, and towering over the horizon, was one of the most amazing things Mallory had ever seen: A canopy of trees as tall as any of the skyscrapers in the city center, bigger around then the oaks in the Matriarch’s front yard, had sprung up around the city where the light used to shine.
Mallory had been to the outskirts of the city before. She, Caleb, and Alex had often played at the edge of the light when they were children, much as all the children in the city did. They would toss bits of grass or sticks or really any little thing into the light and watch it sizzle into vapor. The boys used to dare each other to touch it, but of course no one went through with such foolish challenges. The light protected the city from what lay beyond, but it was dangerous, and they all knew it. Yet, they could all see what was beyond the light. It was just more pastureland, which is why the cattle and the sheep were still fenced in lest they run through the light looking for greener pastures and get vaporized.
But now all those pasturelands beyond the light had been vaporized and replaced by monstrous trees. Their branches were trimmed into an arc, tracing the curvature of where the light used to shine. Mallory’s eyes followed the branches reaching into the sky down to the base of the trunks. No light shown below the trees. It was dark, and the darkness seemed alive and dangerous. All the childhood stories of what lay beyond the light flooded back into her memory. And somehow Mallory knew that the trees had always been there, the pasturelands in the light were never real—just a projected illusion—another protection from what lay beyond the city.
Then Mallory noticed that the sheep and the cattle were thronged up against the fence opposite the forest. Their eyes were fixed on the trees, and they were all making wavering calls in their own animal tongues. The animals seemed to be afraid of the forest as well, and they wanted to get away from it. A shiver ran down Mallory’s body causing the hairs on her arms to stand on end. Using her good arm, she grabbed Caleb’s hand and pulled herself close to him. Caleb did not pull away but instead wrapped his other arm protectively around her, holding her tightly. Mallory could feel his heart beating rapidly in his chest through her shoulder. She looked up into his eyes, hoping for some reassurance, but his eyes were fixed on the forest, pupils dilated, and quickly scanning back and forth looking for danger.
A murder of crows lifted off from the trees suddenly, cawing loudly. Caleb spoke with some urgency, but his voice was low and authoritative. “Let’s get inside and get what we need quickly. I need to get back and tell my father about this.”
The group nearly ran the rest of the distance to the Sprite Rookery, never really taking their eyes off the dark forest and remaining utterly silent. The doors of the Rookery opened for the Sprite Master when she approached them, and when the group of seven made it through the entrance, the group breathed a sigh of relief. Their relief was short lived, as the Rookery was nearly as dark as the undergrowth below the distant forest.
The interior of the building looked like a large warehouse with brick walls and a concrete floor. Rows upon rows of industrial shelving spread out endlessly before them loaded with pieces of sprites not yet joined together and birthed by the Dikaió. The shelves loomed four stories high, and somewhere up in the gloom there were Dikaió lights that were not shining. With the destruction of the generators below City Hall, the City Services Manager had been stringing wires across the city, trying to tie together all the emergency generators in the city in order to provide some semblance of Dikaió power to the citizens. Of course, these services were being provided on an essential basis, which meant the government and City Council members first, then the clothing and shelter industries, and so on. Most citizens were still living without power, and non-essential services like the Sprite Rookery were still in the dark. The only light in the building came in from some windows high above the Rookery floor, and an eerie, undulating red glow that seemed to be emanating from the far end of the long rows of the shelves. The group stood looking at the light with wide eyes, trying to make out what could be making such a wicked-looking glow.
“The steel vats are downstairs, and in the dark their light shines all the way upstairs,” the Sprite Master said, breaking some of the tension in the group.
Caleb got down to business. “Where are the wheels? And let’s grab some of those parts that can be used as tools while we’re here.”
“The wheels are in aisle D-17,” the Sprite Master pointed to her left. There were large signs on the shelves near the front with alpha-numeric designations. “And the parts I’m thinking of are scattered about in different areas.”
“Okay, Ms. Knenne and you two bring one cart and come with me to get the wheels. The rest of you go with Reddy with the other cart. Let’s meet back here in ten minutes tops, alright?”
Caleb started walking toward the aisle labeled D-1, and Mallory followed him, though she was uneasy about walking deep into the darkness of the row. Two men followed behind her cautiously wheeling the cart with wide eyes. The shelves were divided into a grid; each crosswalk between shelves would start a new number: D-2; D-3, etc. The parts housed in each shelf seemed entirely unrelated to each other, at least so far as Mallory could tell. There were piles of red-wire mesh sitting next to stacks of copper disks next to plates of silver metal. It was a wonder that the Sprite Master could find anything in this mess, but Mallory supposed she did not usually need to since most of the work was done by the Dikaió rook sprites anyway.
They had just passed D-12 when there was a sharp noise of metal scraping against metal to their right. The whole group jumped, and Mallory felt herself once again in Caleb’s embrace looking for protection. She was getting tired of feeling so afraid, but the scraping metal did not make her feel like leaving Caleb’s arms anytime soon either. The scraping noise stopped, and a large shadowy figure crossed in front of them. It had a multitude of arms and was holding a huge sheet of metal in the air. It turned and rambled down the labyrinth of shelving toward the glowing red light. It was one of the rook sprites rushing off to the forges to continue joining new sprites for the city. The group shook off the shock of meeting the sprite in the dark and continued down the aisle.
Section D-17 was the final section of aisle D, and the light of the windows barely reached this far into the depths of the building, but there were three large doors glowing red from the forges below that not only provided light but a withering heat from the fires below the building, melting the sheets of metal dragged into their depths into red-hot liquid. The red glow from the doors provided enough illumination that Mallory could see there were piles of sprite wheels stacked on the shelves, falling off the shelves, and in piles along the back wall. She was not sure if there were one-hundred thousand wheels here, but there were certainly thousands of them. The men stopped and began loading wheels into the cart. Mallory tried to help, but her broken arm only allowed her to pick up one wheel at a time, and she found herself getting in the way more than being of service, so she stepped back and wandered over to the doors to the forge. Through the two outer doors there were ramps for the rook sprites to go up and down, and through the center was a stairway that descended into the forge. Smoke was billowing up the ceilings of the stairways and ramps, and when Mallory looked up, she could make out a vast cloud of smoke gathering in the rafters of the Rookery. The ventilation fans were probably not working without the Dikaió to power them. It would not be long before the whole building was filled with smoke.
Still, Mallory was curious about what was below and started cautiously walking down the staircase. She had never seen the process of sprite birthing, but she knew from her leadership studies that it was very similar to the christening for citizens. Once a sprite had been joined together, the Sprite Master would assign it a Dikaió purpose and a citizen to serve in its purpose. If the rook sprites were continuing to join the pieces of the sprites together, Mallory wondered what purpose the sprites were serving without the Dikaió. It did not take her long to discover the answer to her question: The floor of the forge was scattered with the empty husks of oblong silver sprites, all seemingly glowing red in the light of the forges’ fires. Rook sprites were busily molding and hammering in the creation of new sprites all over the room and when a sprite’s body was finished, it was placed in a bin, already heaped high enough over the top of its sides that the sprite would roll down the pile and spill onto the floor. The piles of sprites were getting high enough that they were starting to make their way up the stairs.
Mallory was startled by a voice behind her, “One thing is for sure, if the Dikaió ever comes back, the Sprite Master is going to have her hands full.” Caleb laughed, and then coughed a little. The fumes of the molten metal were pretty strong and getting stronger.
“C’mon, Mal. We’ve got what we need. Let’s get out of here.”
She noted that he had reverted to his pet name for her when the others were not around, and she made a note to ask him about what was going on when they had more time alone, away from others’ ears. When they got back to the entrance of the Rookery, the rest of the group was waiting with two carts full of materials. The sun was setting, and none of them wanted to be anywhere near the dark woods at night, so they all rushed back to the Governor’s house to deliver the materials for the carts.
Now as Mallory was walking to the hospital to get her cast taken off, the cart construction had been going on for four weeks, and Mallory marveled at the change the Farmer’s Market had made in that time. While the grocery boxes all still hovered over their respective families, nearly one-in-ten families was pushing what had come to be known as a Chorus Cart to haul home their groceries. Most of the families had joined together in packs, carrying each other’s lighter items and putting the heavier items for all the families in the cart. Cooperation had always been one of the city’s highest imperatives, but Mallory had never seen the city come together in such camaraderie in her lifetime. Still, the citizens’ hateful looks at her were often followed by a disgusted look at their Chorus carts, and Mallory knew they would be only too happy to ditch those carts if the Dikaió returned.
She felt a sense of relief when she got out of the market area, but that relief was short-lived because as she climbed the gentle slope of Main Street nearing the hospital, she could see the tops of the dark forest rising higher above the horizon with every step. Scouts had gone round the pasturelands surrounding the city over the last month and found that the forest completely encircled the city. No one had dared to venture within two-hundred yards of the forest, but it was there, looming and dangerous.
Mallory found that every inch nearer to the forest increased her anxiety just a little. By the time the hospital was in view, she was sprinting for the safety of the building. Her eyes darted from the hospital to the distant, dark trees, and back again as she ran. She swung through the open door on the side of the building in what she felt was the nick of time and was caught up short by a hand that grabbed her shoulder.
“What’s the rush, Mal?” She looked into Caleb’s blue eyes, and Mallory felt her anxiety fade away. He had been waiting there for her.