The Strings in the Shadows

Chapter. Three- In which Kitchen Boy meets Shadow

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When Jack had seen the Ghost Lady in his tree twirling a dagger like it was a piece of hay, his heart had almost stopped. When she told him to sit down, his heart began to beat again, so loudly that Jack didn't even hear the one o'clock Castle Bell ring. It had almost looked like she had been thinking about stabbing him, or something. But nobles are pathetic weaklings, kitchen Cedd thought, she couldn't do that. Think again, Jack's eyes sent to his brain.

The Ghost Lady was beautiful, even with leaves in her black hair. He thought they sorta matched her eyes, which were the sparkling color of fabled emeralds from a Larendi mine. But there was a hardness about her, like she was as tough as any emerald. Her leather vest over a tunic seemed to hug her body like a second skin (which his mother would not approve of, but Jack didn't mind). There was a smudge of dirt on her face, and she seemed to move like a cat, completely at balance in the tree. She moved silently, too, Jack noticed, as she seemed to flow down the oak to his branch. He began to have a sneaking suspision about who she was.

"What's the title?" The noble asked suddenly. Jack was so distracted by a small purple crown tatooed on the back of her left hand that was suddenly very close to his own that he forgot why he had climbed this tall tree in the first place.

"Huh?" He asked. "Oh, my book."He wobbled awkwardly a bit as he retrieved his book from his apron pocket. He handed the slightly battered black book over to the Ghost Lady. "It hasn't got a title, as far as I can tell. It's really old, though. i found it in the library and thought it would be an interesting story." What Jack didn't say was he found the book hidden under a bookshelf in his little alcove after one of his marbles had fallen out of his pocket and rolled next to it. The book had had a thick layer of dust on it.

"No title? That's odd, don't you th- !" The lady looked skocked as she opened the book, the first time Jack had seen emotion on her face.

"What? What is it?" Jack thought she might have seen a crushed spider or something nasty spilled on the inside pages.

"This is... This is a Macintosh Notebook!" She began to rapidly flip through the small book like she couldn't get enough of it.

"Why are apples so important?" Jack was so flabbergasted by the lady's behavior that he didn't notice he was being impertanent.

"Albert Macintosh! Not the fruit, the genius behind the Mechaniks Guild! Everyone thought he was mad and got thrown into an asylum, but then his theorems proved right and he was released! He died the year I was born, it's been said that in the last year of his life he gathered thinkers and eingeneers like himself and founded the Mechaniks guild!" The lady was so animated that she looked up from the apparently precious book at Jack witha mixture of surprise, admiration, and happiness. "You've never heard of him?"

"Nope."

"Look, look here," the girl scooted closer to Jack and showed him a page. It had a sketch of what looked like a train with words in fragmented sentences on the edges of the paper, things like "Steam Power?", "3/2x 7:896 D/V= 3^43r per sec", and "Remember to go shopping on Tuesday." The margins were full of numbers that Jack guessed were calculations. "Macintosh was an absolute brilliant scientist as well a Mechanik," she gushed,"his theories on the makeup of stars and their adaptable abilities were so complicated it took half the Scientology Guild three years to even decipher his hypothesis!"

"If his work's so important, why's it gathering dust in the library?"Jack wondered.

"Yeah, these designs are amazing." The noble wasn't listening, just like every other noble he'd ever met. " Flying machines, stairs that move with people on them..." The lady trailed off. "Show me."