The Poems of Madam Albithurst: The Twist

I awoke to the sight of a childish face staring down at me. The face was small, kind, and unashamed. Wound about with colored cloth, the skin was covered with slanted parallel lines, a strange scar or tattoo I had never seen before.

I sat up, most uncomfortably, as my various limbs had chosen to become quite stiff and sore. The face moved backwards, and in motion were the scars made clear: they were no tattoos but breaks in the papery skin, shifting back and forth as the little thing danced away, half like a child and half like a dancing ribbon tied the end of a stick.

The long ribbon settled, curling and coiling into the child-like shape again, and from a distance of no more than the length of my leg, the lines were as invisible as charity.

The reedy voice of dear Mr. Porist met my thirsty ear. “Madam Albithurst!” he cried. “Madam Albithurst, I was so worried for you.” The tiny man leapt up from the log where he had been sitting, and circled the tiny fire into which he had been staring. His quivering ears, recently trimmed, dangled as he bent to place his face next to mine. “I am so grateful you are alive!”

“As am I,” I said with not the slightest sense of shame. “Though I admit to some surprise that it should be so. The last thing I remember was the Golden Howdah shaking and rocking like a sick horse, and upon closer inspection, we are certainly not in the sick-bay.” I knew this, because while logs and fires and mud-thatched lean-tos were not uncommon things across the Myriad Worlds, they had their place, and their place was not on any of the sanctioned vessels for travel through the Velvet.

“Oh ho!” A booming voice broke through poor Mr. Porist’s replay, and the thick body of Sir Juhrooz the Circumspect stepped into view. “I hear the marvelous Madam Albithurst has returned to us! A pleasure to see you again, Madam. I feel I must apologize for the unpleasant circumstances, though they are not of my making.”

“Nor of mine,” I replied, “though I dearly wish someone would explain what these circumstances are?” At this point I turned my attention towards the sprightly strip of fabric that danced about in the shape of a tiny person. “As well as who our strange new companion might be?”

At my address, the spindly paper bent in half, bowing and shifting like confetti on the wind. With a voice as gentle as cream, the figure spoke thusly: “I don’t have a name, fair, for a name must come from who I am, and I am no who but what. What I am I have been many years and many ways, and always among friends. A sudden revelation, a kindly voice from above, an errant twitch or sudden death, and always with great complication.”

“No!” Mr. Porist gaped, and inspected the being with great interest. “You’re a Twist!”

“Twist I am and may be and have been before,” the Twist said, its edges scraping against each other as it danced around the edge of the tiny mud-room. “Twist I may always be, unless I subject myself to my own purpose, and find myself something else entirely.”

Now, I must admit that I have a certain antagonism towards such things; to come from nowhere without hint nor invitation betrays a terrible lack of good manners. I have come across the strange beings many times in my long experience as a Sensate, and while many people swear by their good nature, kindly disposition, and helpful inclinations, I find them atrociously ill-equipped to handle anything as intricate and delicious as a well-made poem. I daresay I was worried the poor thing would ruin everything, and so I was rather brusque in answering: “Well, what are you doing here? This is hardly the time or place for you!”

“Now, now,” the deep voice of Sir Juhrooz came from my left, as his gauntleted hand reached out in calming supplication. “Let us not be too antagonistic towards our benefactor. It is on their barge we are currently floating, after all, and I have no desire to try and swim in the Velvet, should they decide we have overstayed our welcome.”

At this comment, I realized my posterior, if you will forgive the common term, was resting on smooth and knotty wooden planks. This in itself was no great revelation until they were paired with the gentle creaking in time with the distant groaning of their nautical cousins; tightly knotted ropes.

Not satisfied with the exclusive analysis of my ear and rear, I refocused my attention on the surrounding environs to discover that Sir Juhrooz was, in fact, exactly correct. My two friends and I were currently lying on a broad deck of wood no wider than a comfortable chaise longue, though considerably longer.

The deck was surrounded on all sides by distant flickering crystals of fire and ice. In the distance, I could see the golden spheres of the Myriad Worlds hovering in front of the deep purple backdrop of the Velvet. In the middle of the plank hung a single lamp, glowing with a brilliant yellow hue. The sails were made of thin reedgrass, and a balloon-like shape of shimmering thread twisted and wound its way above our heads. I might have called it beautiful, had I not been so irate.

Now, let it not be said that I wasn’t grateful at finding ourselves saved from the rather rambunctious situation we had been subjected to, but the manner in which we were saved filled me with consternation — a feeling that was apparently not shared by my compatriots.

“I have never seen one of you before,” Mr. Porist reached out a finger for the tiny paper to shake. “Have you been manifest long? When were you made?”

“Made?” The Twist vaulted itself onto Mr. Porist’s palm, dancing so extravagantly about like a candle-flame that I wondered that Mr. Porist was not cut. “Manifest made was I some seven long years hence, on a tale as told by a young man on the ocean sea, searching for his lost love’s band, long since stolen by a hungry fish. So long had he searched that his limbs were aching and his fingers raw. So long had he sailed that his ship was creaking and leaking, about to crumble away in the eroding waves. So long had he sailed that his skin once as yellow as mine was now brown as coconut from the sun, and his once black hair as pale as his skin once was. And so once more did he throw his line, and once more did no fish bite, but a fiendish shark did challenge the boat, and remove the man’s hand with jaws of scaly skin. He fought the shark for a day and a night, until the shark did impale itself upon a shattered plank. Then did the man cut open the shark, for he had not eaten, and what should he find in the stomach’s gullet, but me, with his lover’s band around my neck, for the fish who had swallowed the ring had in turn been swallowed by the shark. Had the poor man been prepared, he might have saved both his hand and his lover’s ring, but instead his surprise brought forth both the fortune of his ring and the fortune of my making.”

“Ah!” Mr. Porist clapped his hand on his leg. “Such a wonderful tale!”

“Indeed,” I said with perhaps less enthusiasm than was polite. “Sir Juhrooz, I find myself feeling unwell. Would you please walk with me as I catch my air?”

“Of course, my good Lady Albithurst,” the Doppewassl said, while I busied myself attempting to stand; a process made more difficult by the size of both my dress and the barge itself. How small it was! So small, in fact, that both I with my billowing dress and my companion with his thick armored suit could scarcely stand side by side. This caused no end of consternation for me, as when asked to receive a breath of fresh air, it is only proper for a gentleman to walk at a lady’s side as they circumnavigate the vessel’s deck. So small was the Twist’s barge that we could do no such thing, and once we had reached the far end of the long barge, were forced to do little more than turn gently in place.

“What do you think of our sudden benefactor?” I asked my stalwart companion as we balanced on the precarious wooden raft. It was quite difficult to look dignified, even in my most eloquent dress, while rotating like a fowl on a spit.

My companion scratched at his mighty chin. “It’s a charming little chap, in its own way, if I do say so myself.”

“I’m afraid you will for the time being,” I admitted, though I did not give voice to my explanation. For you see, I have a particular dislike of Twists. They appear when least expected, and always linger on the mind. What might have happened, one is forced to wonder, should this Twist have not appeared? Would I be swimming in the Velvet, dead and cold as a statue? If I were then saved, centuries later, would some kind of biomancer re-fill my skin with life?

“Well, I will not argue with you,” the Doppewassl said once his continued rotation presented me with more than his back. “Nevertheless, I am grateful it arrived when it did. By the Hollow, our situation was quite untenable.”

“Might I trouble you for a moment to assist me with my memory?” I asked. “The last thing I remember was —” and here I stopped myself, for the last thing I remembered was the Archonarchian standing over a bloody corpse, and I was not ready to divulge that potentially unimportant fact.

“There was an explosion on the Golden Howdah,” Sir Juhrooz said as he scraped his rough chin with a chain gauntleted finger. “It was bedlam. Chaos. By the Hearth, not a single one of them knew how to act in a crisis! They ran about pell-mell, screaming and crying and begging for someone to save them all. That Driver of yours, Sir Skan, he kept his head. He knew what to do, and he did it. Got most of the passengers to the life-boats, and pushed them off himself.”

It is always a delight to hear when one of your dear friends is applauded for bravery, competency, or similar virtue. It is in so many ways a comment on ones good taste, and so I reached out to pat my companion on his arm to thank him for the complement.

As he continued his explanation, his face drew pale: “As for us, that Mr. Porist of yours wouldn’t leave without you, so I followed him up and down the rocking ship until we found you. You were lying on the ground, knocked rather silly. I pulled you on my back, and we ran for the stairs back to the deck, but, well, we were too late; the Howdah gave a great moan and snapped in half like a dry twig. Almost slipped into the Velvet, we did. Your Mr. Porist held onto my hand as I held onto you, and we dangled there for a time before even the brave hands of your friend were not enough to keep us stable…” Sir Juhrooz spread his arms wide with a clattering of metal. “And now here we are.”

It was at that sentiment, the simple act of clear and precise description, accurate and unassuming, that brought it clear to my mind that Sir Juhrooz was to become a great friend. ‘Now here we are,’ he said; such a marvelous distillation of everything one holds dear.

To say the hereandnow is perhaps more important than the future or past is akin to saying that ones person is perhaps more important than the dreaming self one inhabits deep in their slumber. I do believe, and here I must be honest with you — I can only hope you forgive me — the future is the greatest lie ever told.

It was this belief that drove me from my countryside home and into the cities of my birth-world. It was this certainty that pushed me into a thousand different places, each more magical than the last. It was this that drove me into the welcoming arms of the Guild in the first place, though it was not what convinced me to stay there.

But listen to me, here I go, wandering off the hereandnow myself. Perhaps later in this poem I shall tell you of exactly why I became a Sensate in the first place, why I joined the illustrious Guild and how I became one of its more preeminent members, but I promise you that tale is nowhere near as fascinating as the tale I tell you now.

So I shall instead tell you what my companion said next as we stood on strange land in the middle of the Velvet. “I wonder,” Sir Juhrooz stroked his chin with a metal hand, “if this barge’s captain might carry us to the Grand Junction, if we were to ask? By the Hearth, we must tell someone of the tragedy of our Golden Howdah, to say nothing of the war we now find ourselves embroiled in.”

“War?” I blinked, my irritation at the fey Twist vanishing under the weight of pure confusion. “My dear Doppewassl, whatever do you mean?”

“Why, what else could crack a Golden Howdah in twain?” Sir Juhrooz struck his metal hands together with a thunderous clap. “Why else would three Archonarchians find themselves on such a conveyance? Surely they were sent to destroy the Golden Howdah in a terrorist attack, no doubt tearing the ship apart with some foul magics or explosive devices. It is an assault on all peaceful people of the Myriad Worlds, and war is the only answer!”

Now, I was not one to be so impolite as to contradict someone for their deeply held beliefs, but I was also certainly not going to allow an innocent person be slandered. “I’m afraid, Good Sir Juhrooz, that I have myself come into information that belies your brusque assessment of the Pilgrims’ guilt. I feel quite confident, if not positive, that the Archonarchians had nothing to do with it.”

“Positive?” the man frowned. “It would be most impolite to argue, and I will not be so ungallant. Instead I will ask you, if you know who did not do it, do you therefore know who did?”

As you must well know, coincidences happen every day across the Myriad worlds, and while I was not so foolish to believe that everything unique or unprecedented was connected, I did have to admit that three such immense events happening in such close a time frame was worthy of note. Therefore, I told my new friend: “While I may not know exactly who destroyed our Golden Howdah, I do know that less than a week ago, the Duke of Ten Vials was found slain in what may have been his house.”

“No!” Sir Juhrooz was appropriately astounded. “Why, surely this is an impossibility!”

“So many believed,” I nodded, “and yet dead he is. I was personally brought in for questioning on the matter. And then, we find ourselves travelers on a Golden Howdah destined for destruction, something that has not happened in centuries, if ever. Surely the Byways Guild would never permit it. And then, less than an hour before the Howdah was destroyed, I myself found one of our traveling companions, an Aeolam, slain in her cabin with a knife to her chest.”

“An Aeolam?” My companion was aghast. “Why slay such a creature?”

“I have it on good authority,” I exaggerated slightly, “that she was part of an organization called the Twelve Hands. I had not heard of this group before, but the Myriad Worlds are quite expansive. Have you ever heard of such an organization before in your travels as a Doppewassl of the Arcwhite Kingdoms?”

“No,” the man shrugged with a resigned sigh. “By the Hearth, I am not a man of conversation. Though I have traveled the Velvet many times in my role as Doppewassl, it has always been in the confines of an Arcwhite carrier, enclosed in steel and covered in silk. This was the first time I had ever traveled by Golden Howdah, from port to port. I am afraid the gossip I heard was from fellow soldiers and shipmin. I know nothing of these Twelve Hands, nor what connection they might have to either the Archonarchy or the Duke of Ten Vials.”

I was about to question the man further, when he stopped his orbit with me. He stared out into the Velvet, and muttered most bemusedly; “For three years I have now traveled, and I have seen in this journey such things as I have never seen before. Insects as large as men, and men as small as dogs. Cats with seven heads and seven tails, who promise fortune to any who can pluck the ring from their paw. A song that aches to be sung, and begs you to spare the time. A beggar-woman — yes, I tell the truth — a beggar-woman offered to give me a bag full of gold, as pure and heavy as could be, if I would only give her a piece of cloth from my true-love’s sleeve. Alas, I had no true-love else I might now be the richest Doppewassl of the Arcwhite Kingdoms.”

Now of course, I was very well versed in traveling across the Velvet, and such stories as he had told me were nothing particularly special or interesting. I had long since learned the trick of the cat’s ring, and the insect-folk of Kcrickth were far too regular travelers to remain notable for long.

What fascinated me more than the stories was the teller, so I turned my attention to my tall and well-armored companion. Sir Juhrooz the Circumspect was his name, and Double-Servant to the Arcwhite kingdoms was his profession. The Angry Pantheon was his devotion, but there was the end of it. I knew nothing yet of his passion, so it was with the most charming smile I could muster that I extended my hand to the man, and said: “I must thank you most profoundly, Sir Juhrooz, as I am feeling much better now, with the wind of the Velvet on my face. Your companionship is most comforting and helpful.”

“Wind?” the tall man looked about, a face of pure bemusement. “I fear you may be ill, dear woman. The Velvet has no wind, nor tide. It is the empty void between the Myriad Worlds.”

At this I did laugh, for if I had not known Sir Juhrooz was no regular sailor among the Velvet, I would have known for sure at that admission. “When you have traveled free from steel confines as often as I have, dear sir, you will come to feel the airless wind.”

“Then this is a pleasure that will be lost to me,” the man gave a grave nod, “for I doubt I shall sail the Velvet again after I finally reach port.”

At this point Mr. Porist appeared at my shoulder, balancing expertly on the small portion of barge that was available to him. “Such a fascinating creature, this Twist! Do you know, I have never met one before? Marvelous and fascinating, such a life it has led, if life it can be called. I daresay, we are most fortunate to have been rescued by such a creature!”

“Have you learned from whence it came?” Sir Juhrooz asked, quite handsomely, I might add. “Or to whence it goes?”

“It came from many places,” Mr. Porist nodded, his long needle nose almost slapping his thick pointy chin. “And it goes to many more. I am certain if we ask it, it will take us to the Grand Junction, and we can continue on our journey from there.”

No sooner had he spoken, then a flash of windy paper slipped from the tiny lean-to at the aft of the raft, and wound itself around Mr. Porist’s arm. Slipping up to the tiny man’s shoulder, the shape of the lanky toy was formed once more, and it spoke through paper-thin edges:

“Though you ask for such a simple thing, I find myself unable to comply with your request; not for any reasons of malice or mischief, but because my own designs, which are few and simple, do not take me near to the Grand Junction. But worry not, for while I am in no able condition to ferry you to where you wish, know I a suitable method to bring you to your destination, in manner and means most suitable to your fair personages.”