17
Nosh’s Eye
—1892, August 9: 4-Hour 22—
The Eerie have a reputation as healers, and it is true that some of their skills lie in healing. But I have found that their talents are not adequately described thus. Perhaps the best way of putting it is that the Eerie have a talent for perception—they perceive many things that others do not. And we might consider how some of their habits encourage this talent for perception. They almost always live alone—Elodeans shun big cities—and they often live in the company of animals. I suspect any of us might develop a greater talent for perception if we lived alone in the woods with a family of raccoons!
—From Sophia Tims’ s Reflections on a Journey to the Eerie Sea
SOPHIA LAY ON the ground, her senses battered by the horrible sounds that echoed through the station. Now that she could hear them, they overwhelmed her, like a wave that filled her mind and pushed out every other thought. Dimly, she understood that Goldenrod, Errol, the pirates, and Wren were somewhere in the confusion, but although the realization made her anxious, she could not think what to do with it. She could not even comprehend what it meant that they were there, in the midst of the fog, with the dragon and the knight.
The two creatures she had seen loomed in her mind, coming into focus. From somewhere that felt terribly remote, as if it had happened long, long ago, she suddenly remembered words of significance: When you see the knight and the dragon, you must think only of your own safety. Your instinct is to stay. You must flee.
Who had spoken these words? Were they from the Ausentinian map? No—Sophia did not think they were. But then where did they come from?
Maxine. The name came like a breath of clean air. Maxine said the words to me, only a few days ago.
Sophia clung to this thought; it seemed the only thing she could trust, for she could not trust what was happening around her, and she could not trust her own senses. Safety. She opened her eyes. She was on the marble floor, curled around her satchel. The red fog was beginning to settle, leaving a thin scum on her fingers and clothes. Around her, the screams and terrible sounds continued.
Sophia urged herself up onto her hands and knees. Directly ahead, she realized, there was silence. The sounds were behind her. Moving inch by inch, she crawled away from them and toward the silence. Her palms struck the floor of the station blindly, and she dragged her knees along behind her. She kept her head tucked down—there was nothing to see if she raised it. The sounds behind her, although they continued to echo, seemed to grow a fraction more remote.
Then there was a sound ahead of her—a footstep and a low laugh. Sophia looked up slowly, dreading what she would see. There was nothing—only red mist. And then the mist parted briefly, and a white figure appeared: tall and regal, wearing a full-length dress and a long veil that obscured her features. Her hands were gloved; her delicate fingers moved gracefully, parting the red mist as if brushing aside a branch. She nodded gently, and her movements were terribly familiar. As she reached to lift the veil, the fog consumed her once more. But that momentary glimpse had been enough. Blanca, Sophia thought, horrified. She survived. She’s here. She’s here.
Sophia scrabbled blindly away. She heard the footsteps following her, easy and assured, unhurried. I have to get away from her. I have to get away from her. I have to get away from her.
The single thought pushed her forward, through the red mist and into the unknown, still crawling on hands and knees. Suddenly her hand touched something firm and somehow rubbery. Sophia recoiled in horror. What is it? What is it? A hand? A foot? She stared down at the object, and the nature of it slowly, slowly dawned on her. A potato, she said to herself, as if assuring herself that it really was. A potato. She touched it experimentally. It did not change. The red fog swirled and parted: an overturned vegetable cart appeared. A large crate of potatoes had fallen from the lower shelf, half its contents scattered. Sophia crawled toward it desperately, even as the fog again descended.
Safety, she repeated to herself. Your own safety. Reaching the cart, she poured out the remaining potatoes and overturned the crate, fitting herself beneath it.
Huddled there, Sophia waited. Blanca’s footsteps were no longer audible. She peered anxiously through the cracks, trying to catch a glimpse of her old foe, but there was nothing to see beyond the red fog. She could not track the passing time. It seemed to her that over the course of many hours she heard the din of the station: running footsteps, screams and cries, the abrupt clatter of collapsing wood. At one point, in her silent corner, someone—a stranger—ran past toward one of the nearby train platforms. Sophia realized, watching his retreating back through the slats of the crate, that he was visible because the fog had begun to clear.
She could see things as far as twelve or even twenty feet away: terrible things. She saw people slumped on the floor. She saw a man holding a chair like a shield, trembling, his eyes closed tightly. One arm held the chair while the other hung at his side uselessly, bleeding onto his clothes and the ground. A red sediment covered every surface. Even the potatoes, strewn all around her, were dusted with crimson.
While one part of her watched the station, frantically observing the same few details over and over again, another part of her was wrestling with the visions that flashed through her mind: Blanca, the knight, and the dragon. How is Blanca here? Sophia asked herself silently. How can she be here? How could she have survived in Nochtland? How would she know that we would be here—today, at this time? The image of the scarred Lachrima lifting her veil appeared in her mind, the red mist swirling around her. Then the dragon appeared and turned its head, nostrils flaring, and great claws flexed open. A pair of great, strong wings with blue veins unfurled, and a long tail cut through the air like a falling tower. Then the knight’s sword shone brightly, catching some shaft of light that pierced the fog, and with a rattle of armor the sword swooped toward her.
Sophia began to realize, with slow perplexity, that she remembered more of them than she had seen. The thought made her uneasy and even more greatly confused. Did I see more and not remember? Did I lose track of time? If I didn’t see more, where do these visions come from? Am I imagining more than I saw? She could not settle her mind—she could not even bring herself to see the frantic circle of her thoughts as something useless. Now that she had found relative safety in the potato crate, her thoughts seemed to run wild, beating about inside the crate like a trapped thing.
More time passed, and the station grew quiet. The fog slowly dispersed. The great statue of the veiled woman came into view, and she was now no longer white—she was red. But she was solid and immobile—a monument, not a person. Sophia realized she could see the entire station; the air had cleared completely. And her thoughts had started to clear as well. The desperate cycle of panicked images began to slow. It seemed fruitless to whirl through them again and again, seeing first the dragon, then the knight, then Blanca, and then the dragon once more. She began to wonder, in a confused and uncertain way, what she had actually seen.
Suddenly a thought burst onto her mind. There are no dragons. She seized upon it with relief and surprise. Using the thought as a handhold, she inched forward. There could not have been a dragon in the station, she thought to herself tentatively, could there? Then what did I see? Who was the knight holding Errol’s sword? And Blanca . . . Could it be that, after seeing Blanca’s statue, I imagined seeing Blanca herself? As her mind stumbled through these questions, another suddenly occurred to her: What had happened to her friends?
With a flood of awareness, Sophia became conscious of how utterly confused she had been. While hiding in the potato crate she had not even wondered about them.
She was on the verge of throwing off the crate and going to look when she heard a sudden echoing sound in the silence. It was heavy clop of footsteps—more hoofbeats than footsteps, and very different from Blanca’s light tread. Sophia looked through the slats, but could see nothing. The sound approached her from the side; she could not shift inside the crate, and so she waited, unmoving, for the creature to pass. Suddenly a great brown face appeared, inches from her own, and a great brown eye gazed at her through the slats. Sophia startled, shifting the crate. It was lifted into the air, exposing her. Sophia curled up, covering her head with her arms and bracing herself for a sudden blow.
None came. There was a brief silence. “We’re not going to hurt you,” a voice said. “I’m sorry Nosh startled you. Only he knew where you were. I would never have found your hiding place.”
Sophia slowly lowered her arms and looked up. Standing above her was the boy she had seen in the antler’s memories, and behind him, looking concerned and faintly apologetic, was the creature himself: a great brown moose with heavy antlers. “Nosh,” Sophia whispered, “and Bittersweet.”
The boy raised his eyebrows. “You know my name.” He held out a hand as green as Goldenrod’s. “We must leave. In a city of this size, there is sometimes looting after the fog has passed, and it can be just as bad as the fog.”
Sophia felt dazed. She knew that her mind had still not fully cleared, and she still did not trust her own thoughts. But she understood that the boy and the moose were offering to help her. “But my friends,” she said weakly.
“I know,” Bittersweet said, glancing over his shoulder, into the station. “We must leave without them. They are already gone.”
There was a sharp whistle, keen and high, from somewhere outside the building. Bittersweet grasped Sophia’s hand. “That’s the looters,” he said. “I’ll explain more later, I promise. But we have to go.”
He cupped his hands by Nosh’s round belly. “Step up on my hands,” he said. Sophia put her raider’s boot onto Bittersweet’s palms and heaved herself up onto Nosh’s back. Bittersweet climbed up behind her. “Take us the safest way you can, Nosh,” he said, patting the moose’s side, “and the sooner we get out of Salt Lick, the better.”