Unlikely kingdoms gone, p.1
Unlikely (Kingdoms Gone), page 1
Unlikely
Frances Pauli
Also by the author:
THE CHANGELING RACE
A Moth in Darkness
The Fly in Paradise
Spiders from Memory
SHIFT HAPPENS
The Dimensional Shift
Aspect Ratio
Echo Location
Space Slugs
Roarke
Lords of Oak and Holly
New Canterbury Affair
Friend or Foe
Thrice Shy
Twelve Dances
Divine Intervention
Man on Fire
A Little Short for an Alien
UNLIKELY
A Kingdoms Gone Story
Chapter One
Satina could smell the paper from the street facing entrance. She stood just inside the stone arch and inhaled the crisp, slightly-musty aroma of old knowledge. Outside the nook, the sea still dominated the evening air, tangy and full of salt and fish and other slippery creatures. Here, however, she could block out the tide for a moment and enjoy the smells of home. Stories lived here, and any town that boasted an archive, that still cared about what once was, was worth her time—even a port town.
Even one that belonged to the Shades.
She ignored that mark, glowing faintly over the doorway inside and out, and lifted her skirts and cape hem enough to enter the main room. It wasn’t quite three stories, and the scrolls that rested on the rickety shelves had long gaps between them, empty spaces where the stories stopped, where history paused and waited to be filled in by the knowledgeable—or the creative. Still, books were books, and she felt her shoulders relax instantly in the presence of these.
The late hour had brought only one other wanderer to the stacks. A woman in a green dress and ratty shawl slumped at one of the reading desks. She’d found a proper book, neatly bound in leather that frayed at each corner, and she lifted the pages with a soft hand, so focused that she failed to give any sign that she noticed Satina’s entrance.
The custodian, however, did not fail to notice. He stumped across the floor boards with the help of a slim cane. His back hunched as much as the woman’s, but it had the permanent curl of long years behind it. A sparse patch of white hair waved at the back of his bald head, and his eyes were barely visible between wrinkles that looked more than a little like old leather. Satina imagined him as a book as well, worn but still brimming with information.
She brushed her cloak back behind her shoulders and marched out to meet him. Reading tables stood to either side, and behind those, the shelves rose all the way to the high ceiling. The old man didn’t come straight at her. He wandered in a serpentine between and around the tables, muddled perhaps, or maybe driven by long custom to a well trodden path. Either way, the center aisle was clear and yet he drifted around to her left side and approached between the rows.
“Hello?”
“Eh?” His cane thumped a final, reverberating clank against the boards, and he leaned forward and titled his head to the side. “You want to read something?”
“Yes, no. I mean I do, but…” But I need a place to hide out. But they’re after me, and your archive felt safe and homey. “I was just hoping for a quiet moment.”
“Well, quiet we can do.” He chuckled, and his old shoulders bounced with it. The gesture went a long ways toward calming her as well. His lips shifted into a smile. Friendly. Here where the paper smelled better than the sea, she’d found exactly what she’d hoped. “This way.”
Satina followed him to the front of the room. They went straight on the return trip, as if his sideways ritual had been appeased. Each step brought a thump of the cane, rattled the shelves and sent a soft whisper of papers rustling. Very nice.
“You’re a goodmother.” His voice was low to begin with, but facing away from her, it dimmed even more, and she had to stretch to catch his words. “Aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Not something you see every day.”
“I can imagine.”
“You grant wishes too?” He stopped beside a tall podium. It faced out across the tables, allowing him to watch the doorway and read at the same time. But she hadn’t seen him behind it when she entered, had she?
“Sometimes.” She’d missed the second tag too, the glowing Shade symbol etched and also painted across the podium’s front.
“I got me a wish,” he said.
Satina took a step backwards. There was only open aisle behind her, and she could run well when she needed to. “Oh?”
“Oh yes.” His old hand shot up, and Satina heard the woman at the table move. She heard the pattering footsteps that would put her directly behind and right in the center of the aisle. “It doesn’t pay well, reading books.”
“You want money?” She could work with that. She’d done it before, but the woman he’d ordered to block her exit suggested this wouldn’t be quite that simple.
“There’s a reward for her.” The lady’s voice rasped more from hard living than age. She probably drank, but then, living in a gang town did that to you. “I seen the flier.”
“I can get you more than that.” Satina stepped back quickly, heard the woman come forward and saw her answer on the old man’s face. Her fingers slipped inside her cloak, and her eyes scanned the building, tried to peer back farther, behind the stacks. “I can grant bigger wishes than that.”
The custodian came forward, nodding his head until the white fluff danced madly. When he stopped, he eyes stretched wide enough she could almost make out their color. “Except, we’d rather just have the reward. You see, we’re a Shade town, goodmother, and you are worth more than money here.”
Satina had no answer to that. There was no answer to it. She bolted straight for him instead. His arms snatched at her cloak, but he was by far the feebler of the two Shades, and she pressed past him, dodging enough that his fingers only brushed the fabric. She threw a handful of powder back over her shoulder, igniting it with a thought. The flash would earn her only a few strides lead, but a few strides would help.
The custodian shouted to the woman, and the clatter of feet chased her to the back wall. No exit there, but she’d seen a glint of moonlight to the left. She spun and slipped behind the shelves, leaping a pile of books and an old crate and making for what she prayed was an unbarred window.
“Stop her!” The man screamed from his podium, too feeble for the chase even.
Satina paused at the open sill, threw a leg outside and looked back to find the woman way too close behind her. She shoved off, fell the short drop to the brush below the window and thanked her goodmother luck for an archive in an old enough building not to have glass panes, not to have its shutters locked.
“She’s here!” Her luck ran out when the woman started screaming. “The Granter is here!”
Lights moved in the streets. Feet pounded against paver stones and even the distant wharfs shifted their attention to her, to the criminal in their midst. Satina bolted uphill, not by the wide road but out across the fields. She ducked through a slick, wooden fence and ran out through the moonlight toward the nearest stand of trees and the pocket hiding in their shelter.
Her cloak billowed like a shadow behind her. She held her skirts high and churned each step closer to safety. They’d spotted her, of course. Men with torches at the fence, slipping through, following her. A dog bayed, and she ran faster, ran until her chest tightened.
The forest drew her in, but the Shades would not stop at its edge. She fled through a thin strip of brush, leaped a fallen log and skidded to a stop beside a tree like any one of the others. The dog growled, just on the far side of the log. Satina stopped to face it. She watched the flames drifting into the woods, saw the torches come.
She should have known better than to try this town. Too many nights sleeping on cold ground had softened her good senses. She’d only thought the archive, thought that a town with an archive, might see past gangs and affiliations. A stupid thought. Now the Shade town faced her, a ring of anger and flame. The dog snarled, and the goodmother Granter stepped one pace to the side and vanished.
Chapter Two
The staircase ended in mid air. Moss caked the stone surface, crowding into the cracks and lending a spongy, green pattern to the ruined structure. The steps turned once, bent as if they still followed the wall that had long since crumbled around them. They rose to a second story that no longer existed, continued to climb and then stopped on nothing, as if one might find some hidden doorway there, hanging in space, some portal to a world long lost.
Satina huddled in the shadow beside the structure, pulled her heavy cloak tighter and pondered the stairway. Pretty. That arch of stone whispered of the Kingdoms as they once were. They sang of the time when the world still embraced magic and the Gentry races mingled freely with humans. A time when she would have been welcome anywhere.
Ironic, the dramatic illusion, the thought of ancient portals hanging in space. She squinted, made her eyes shift to a subtler vision and eyed the authentic portal, the genuine door she’d slipped through only moments before. The one that had just saved her skin. The real thing shimmered twenty feet away from the elegant ruin, but it marked a spot of little visual import, a bush, a stretch of mud like any other—except for the pocket of Old Space hiding behind it.
She sniffed and pressed her back against the mossy stones. For the moment the pocket didn’t matter much. Satina let her eyes drift, still seeing what she could. The portal had brou
A muddy road wound through the forest only a short trot from the staircase. Deep ruts, where a wagon had passed not so long before, gleamed in the moonlight. Rain had fallen recently, though long enough past that the foliage had already dried. The woods themselves were thick and shrouded, offering only hints of the terrain beyond between thin tree trunks and dense shrubbery. Farmland, no doubt, with a well-traveled roadway. She’d find a village close by, a cluster of hard-working souls seeking nothing more than health and safety.
Maybe she could help them.
Convinced the pocket had delivered her where she could do some work, Satina settled her attention on the stairway’s arch. She’d been on the run too long to remember safety, the warmth and promise of a permanent residence. No matter. Her lot rarely found a long-term welcome among civilized folk anyway. Even without a price on her head, her trace of Gentry blood set her forever apart.
These stairs made a perfect boundary, a lone sentinel and reminder of the Old Kingdoms. Had she been affiliated, she might have tagged them herself, and so she circled it now, convinced that either gang would agree with her assessment. The soft ground made little sound under her steps, and her cloak hung in a wave the same color as the night so that she feared little of detection, little compared to the knot of unease that would not rest until she’d made certain she hadn’t landed amid the Shades.
But the old stones held no tag, no mark of any sort visible to her sight, mundane or otherwise. A second circuit produced the same results, and she had to concede. The area, by some miracle, had escaped notice, though she’d long believed not an inch of these lands hadn’t been divided and tagged to one affiliation or the other by now.
She’d heard rumors, tales of places still untouched by Shade or Starlight, but doubted, even here in the face of the unmarked stair, that she’d been lucky enough to escape that noose. She had found shelter though, tagged or not, and the wind bore enough trace of moisture and chill that she’d soon be grateful for it.
Satina scooted into the shadow beneath the stones. Her hand followed the surface, squishing pillowy moss and guiding her steps until the arch sheltered her completely. Then she dropped into a squat, tossing her cloak open and rummaging in one of her many leather bags with her free hand. The ground was too damp for sitting, but if she wedged her back against the structure, she could relax in some measure of comfort. The device she withdrew would do the rest.
She’d recovered the metal disks at different locations. The lower of the two, she suspected had been a sword hilt once, the sigils cast into the bronze were meant to repel evil, and it was for that factor that she’d hoarded the scrap. When a later dig produced the brooch, the idea for her device solidified. She’d bartered for a simple spindle, mounted the repellent disk half an inch below the broach, which still harbored an attraction enchantment. The flowery carvings on its face led her to suspect a love spell, some trick of a courtly lady long before the Final War.
Love or luxury, the attraction was all that mattered for her purposes. Using opposing magics, one to draw and one to repel, her theory had borne fruit with only a little tweaking. Now she stabbed the long end of the spindle into the soft earth until it stood without tilting. Her fingers swung the lower disk sunwise adding the impetus of her own, faint magic until the metal spun smoothly on its circuit. Then she twirled the brooch in the opposite direction.
Heat burst from the device, warming her hands in an instant. The two spells fought with one another, and Satina smiled at her ingenuity. She never got tired of it, of feeling the heat build. In moments the ground would dry and she could sit and pass the night in comfort without need of a fire.
A twig snapped. Her heart jolted and she looked, instinctively, toward the pocket. She saw nothing but the shimmer, knew exactly how little that meant. Her warmer made no noise, but the energy it expelled could be sensed by the right eyes…maybe the wrong eyes. She listened and moved one hand out very slowly to stop the dual spin.
If someone had opened the pocket, they still may not have spotted her. They might not have sensed the magic unless they’d been looking for it, unless they’d been on her tail the entire time. She peered into the night. She watched the bushes, scanned the empty road and almost missed the shadow slipping toward the stairs from the opposite side.
As it was, her hand grabbed at her cloak only a breath before the figure reached the bottom stair. She listened to its steps, felt their tremble through the stone even as she tried to merge her body with it, to blend into the arch. The vibrations followed the structure to its pinnacle. Satina held her breath, snuggled further into the cloak and watched the open space at the stairway’s end.
A pair of boots dropped into view. They were sewn of soft leather, tightly stitched, and painted along both soles with liquid magic. She knew its language. Squinting at the script, she picked out at least one sigil for stealth glowing among the charms for protection, luck and speed. He either practiced the Old Arts, or he’d stolen those boots.
Something about the way his legs swung back and forth, relaxed but speaking of absolute confidence, suggested the former. The owner of these boots would be well-versed, possibly even Gentry or of that blood. Not the last person she wanted to see on a dark night on unfamiliar ground, but a danger all the same.
She didn’t dare move. The ensorcelled boots swung, first one leg and then the other. The clouds wandered away from the moon, which lit the road like a silvery ribbon. The invader above her whistled a long trilling note against the silence. It wandered into a soft tune. He knew she was there. The swinging boots, the song—all too casual and meant to tell her exactly how little he cared.
Her skin prickled. She lifted her eyes to the stones over her head, as if she could gaze through them and catch some small advantage. A flare of iridescence shimmered beneath a layer of moss. She squinted at the sigil, followed the lines with her eyes and let her frown deepen. The mark was old, but then moss no doubt took root quickly here.
The tag claimed the ruins for the Starlight gang. Bound by the rune and the magical paint, the affiliation would hold until the sigil wore away or a contrary ward supplanted it. She’d been right all along. Not an inch of their world had remained undivided. Satina turned away from it, away from everything it represented, and a squeak escaped her. A man’s face hung over the stair’s edge. His eyes sparked like the sigil once, a flare of power, before his thin mouth stretched into a smile, and he winked at her.
Chapter Three
Dread coiled inside her belly. She watched the face pull back, the legs swing over again as he dropped like a leaf to the ground in front of her. Not Shade at least, not that it helped her much. Still, whatever he was, Shade would have been worse. Shade would have meant the end of her.
“Nice night for it.”
“Excuse me?” She squinted and made her voice tremble. Her hand slid under a fold of cloak, fumbled for the bag of soft powder.
“Nice night, lovely moon, a little magic.” His voice matched his build, wily, lithe and never quite holding completely still. A lightweight cloak swirled at the back of his knees, and though the moonlight beyond made him a swath of shadow, his eyes sparked yellow with the word, magic, and she knew she’d been right about his blood.
“I suppose it would be.” How much had he seen? She shrugged and squatted in her original position. Her fingers pried the bag of dust open, and she waited for his next move, mustering her best innocent smile.
“That’s a neat trick.” He hopped forward and put up both hands, palms facing out. His head tilted to one side, and his features caught an angle of moonlight. Sharp nose, high cheekbones and a wide, thin grin, Gentry if her eyes could be trusted, and not just a trace of it. “How’d you do it?”
“I’m sorry, what?” He hadn’t seen the device, only noticed the warmth, possibly smelled the subtle tint of magic in the air beneath the staircase. Hard to deny, that, and she fell back on her only other option. “You mean the heat?” She blinked, widened her eyes to the point that only one with her special talents—with her sort of blood—might achieve. “That’s nothing. A toy I purchased in the south.”
