Land Keep

by J. Scott Savage

  Even though she was right, Marcus couldn’t help gawking at everything around him. It was like walking through the middle of the most amazing special effects movie ever made. Fascinating things were all around—from the man charging admission to watch a caged mimicker turn into your worst nightmare to the group of black-cloaked women who barely came up to his knees playing strange flute music that made him feel woozy if he listened too long.

  Some things he could understand. There was the man in the stained leather apron standing with his arms folded across his broad chest as pieces of meat sliced themselves off a butchered cow and he waited patiently for the dark paper that wrapped itself around them. Or the flock of chickens in the wooden crate saying things like, “What do you call two chickens chasing one another? Fowl play!”

  But other things left him completely confused. Like the woman weaving red liquid into braids up to ten feet in the air like huge strands of colored glass before they disappeared with a loud pop. Or the group of young men floating hundreds of feet above a meadow, inside gently glowing bubbles. At any moment, Marcus expected a movie director to step out of the shadows. Is this how Kyja felt the first time she saw an Earth city?

  Marcus picked up his pace, realizing he was falling behind again. “I knew you had magic here,” he whispered. “But this is . . . I don’t know. Amazing!”

  Kyja gave a curt nod. “See why I don’t exactly fit in? Stop staring and try not to look like too much the quinnel.”

  Marcus didn’t know what a quinnel was, but he got the point and tried not to gawk too obviously. They approached the city gates—iron-bound wooden structures that looked strong enough to stop a charging elephant. Before the gates stood a pair of stern-looking guards outfitted in heavy armor.

  “Just look normal and let me talk,” Kyja hissed under her breath.

  Marcus gave a quick look toward the sky. Riph Raph was up there somewhere, keeping an eye out. They’d both agreed it would be wiser not to have the skyte join them for the time being. A boy and a girl might be able to slip through the crowds unnoticed, but pet skytes were rare enough to attract attention.

  “Names?” the guard on the left asked, looking them up and down with a bored frown. “Kailid and Yerhom,” Kyja said “My brother was attacked by a cave bat. We’re here to see the healer.”

  “Very well,” the guard sighed.

  Kyja raised her arm, and the guard on the right pressed a wad of something pink onto the back of her hand. She nodded to Marcus, and he did the same. The guard slapped on what looked like a wad of bubble gum. A moment later, the wad flashed dimly, forming into a different shape.

  “Come, Yerhom. The healer will be angry if we’re late,” Kyja said. As soon as they were out of sight of the guards, she put her hand to her mouth and licked rapidly at the pink substance which was changing into some kind of symbol. Following her lead, Marcus raised his hand to his mouth.

  “Don’t!” Kyja cried. Marcus recoiled as she took his hand and licked the back until the pink was completely gone.

  “One of the few benefits to having no magic,” she said. “If you’d done that, you would have been covered in very painful and embarrassing sores all over your body for at least a week.”

  Marcus examined his hand. It looked a little shiny but showed no trace of pink. After months in Farworld, he thought he understood things. Now he was realizing how much he still had to learn. “What was it?”

  “A visitor brand,” Kyja said, rolling her eyes as if she was talking to a baby. “They’re to help the authorities identify people who aren’t from the city.”

  Marcus shook his head. “So what now? You obviously know a lot more than I do. How do we find Land Keep?”

  “I have no idea,” Kyja admitted. They studied the mass of people moving through the city streets. She suddenly stiffened. “Over there.”

  Marcus turned in the direction she was looking. A man in a red Keeper’s robe walked with a stiff air of authority. As he approached, people moved out of his way. Obviously, he was viewed as some kind of authority figure, but his face showed none of the boredom the guards’ had. Instead, he seemed to be studying the crowds, examining the faces looking away as he passed by.

  “Inside,” Kyja urged, pushing Marcus into a nearby doorway.

  They ended up in what seemed to be some kind of shop. Shelves of odd little statues and gleaming necklaces filled the room from floor to ceiling. Behind a pitted counter of dark wood sat a fat man with a sweaty, bald head. He carved a piece of rock with a tiny hammer that glowed red and rang like a bell with each tap. As Marcus and Kyja entered, the man looked up from his work.

  “What do you kids want?” the shopkeeper asked in a pleasant, high-pitched voice, and Marcus realized it wasn’t a man at all. It was a large, bald woman. She set aside her hammer. “Love, maybe? Happy feet? Shiny, white teeth?”

  “What’s all this?” Marcus asked, ignoring Kyja’s warning look.

  “What is it?” The shopkeeper grinned showing a mouth filled with teeth so pearly they would have put an oyster to shame. “What isn’t it? Charms for anything a boy or girl could want. Need to impress the ladies with your manliness? Try this.” The woman picked up a little pin that looked like a closed fist. She slid it onto her robe, and instantly her forearms bulged. She pulled up her sleeve and made a muscle as big as a coconut. The minute she took the pin off, her arm returned to its normal shape.

  “Cool!” Marcus breathed, earning a curious look from the woman and a glare from Kyja.

  “How about you, little lady?” Rising from her stool, the woman lifted a glittering necklace and leaned toward Kyja as though preparing to put it around her neck.

  “No, thank you,” Kyja blurted, instantly stepping back. “But I’ve got some gold I’d like to sell.” She set the rock Cascade had given her on the counter, and the woman gave a quick nod.

  “Fair enough.” Apparently children selling valuable stones wasn’t as strange an occurrence here as it was on Earth.

  “What happened to you, lad?” the woman asked as she carried the rock to a small stone table near the back of the store.

  Marcus looked quickly away. “I was, um . . . attacked by a cave bat. I’m here to see the healer.”

  “Cave bat, eh?” the woman said. “They can be nasty creatures, all right.” She put the stone onto a circle-shaped red cloth and tapped it with her hammer. “Have to say though, I’ve never seen marks like those on your arms left by a cave bat.”

  Marcus looked at the red welts left by the sniffler’s suckers. They were beginning to fade, but the circles still stood out against his pale skin.

  “We’d better leave,” Kyja said, pushing Marcus. “We’ll come back for our money later.”

  “I wouldn’t do that just yet.” The woman nodded toward the door. Kyja and Marcus turned to see another Keeper—or maybe it was the same one—walking slowly past store fronts on the other side of the street. “I don’t imagine the guards noticed anything when you came through the gate. They’re hungover half the time and drunk the other. But a sharp-eyed Keeper wouldn’t likely miss sniffler marks, now, would he?”

  Chapter 12

  Dog Days

  Kyja eyed the woman behind the counter and the Keeper moving slowly along the other side of the street, trying to decide which way to take her chances. “What do you want?” she finally asked the woman.

  The woman rubbed her head. “I want a handsome sailor who has a lot of money and a hankering for fat, bald women. You haven’t seen one have you?”

  When Kyja only grimaced, the shopkeeper turned her attention to Marcus. “Is your friend always so stern?”

  “More than you’d think,” Marcus agreed, earning himself a dirty look.

  “We’re in a lot of trouble here,” Kyja said. “This is no time for laughing.” If this woman alerted the authorities, they’d never make it out the city gates, but if Marcus tried to use magic on her, the commotion could be just as bad.

  The shopkeeper did
something to their rock, and the gold oozed out of it, forming a small, gold rectangle. “Not bad. Not bad at all.” She lowered her bulk onto a creaky stool and set the gold bar on the counter. “I’ve always found that humor is one of the best cures for trouble. I once owned a one-eyed swamp runt that could tell the most—”

  “You can have the gold,” Kyja said. “Just give us enough time to get outside the city walls before you tell the Keepers.”

  “What makes you think I’d tell those stuffed robes anything? You’re in a great deal of trouble if the Keepers of the Balance are looking for you. They generally find what they’re looking for. But that doesn’t mean I have to turn you over to them.”

  “Thank you for not telling.” Kyja reached for the gold bar, but the woman placed her big, pink hand over the top of it.

  “Not so quick.”

  Kyja narrowed her eyes. “I thought you said you didn’t want our gold.”

  “Of course I want it,” the shopkeeper said. “I run a business, don’t I? Show me a shopkeeper that says she doesn’t want gold, and I’ll show you a liar or a woman that’s out of business. But I want to earn it honestly. We never decided what it is you need.”

  “Right now we need to get out of here.” Kyja watched the door anxiously. After searching the other side of the street the Keeper would probably start checking shops on this side.

  “Fair enough,” the woman said, taking her hand from the bar. “I won’t tell you how to run your business. River knows I have enough trouble running mine. But I can tell you that you’ll be lucky to get two blocks from here without running into another one of those red-robed fanatics. Word is, they’re keeping an eye out for a young girl and boy who gave them the slip.”

  “Oh, no,” Kyja said with a groan. Their plan was coming completely apart before it ever got started. They had no choice but to get outside the city as fast as they could and somehow continue the search for Land Keep out there on their own.

  “But then,” the woman said, fingering the bar of gold again, “it would make their search much more difficult if they were looking for a boy and a girl, but you two were . . . something else.”

  “Like what?” Marcus asked far too enthusiastically for Kyja’s taste. She’d seen plenty of shopkeepers try to cheat children.

  The big woman hefted herself to her feet with a loud grunt and plucked a red ribbon off the shelf. It had a small, silver charm hanging from the front that looked sort of like a tiny bone. “Here,” she said, handing Marcus the ribbon. “Tie this around your neck.”

  Kyja watched apprehensively as Marcus wrapped it around his neck and knotted the ribbon in a bow. “Is something supposed to happen?” he asked. “I don’t—yip.”

  Without any warning, Marcus disappeared, staff, robe and all. In his place was a small brown dog, with shaggy fur that nearly covered his eyes, and a bushy tail. Kyja started forward as the dog looked up at her in surprise, then down at itself.

  “Hey, look . . . bark . . . at me!” the dog cried in Marcus’s voice. “I’m a . . . ruff . . . dog.”

  “I’m still working on a few issues,” the shopkeeper said, resting her hands on her large hips. “There’s the whole barking problem. And the transformation only lasts for twenty or thirty minutes at a time. Then you have to let it rest for a bit. I’m not exactly sure how many uses it’s good for. But it should be long enough for the two of you to get wherever you’re going.” She untied the bow, and a moment later the dog turned back into Marcus.

  “That was so . . . ruff . . . cool!” he said, picking up his staff that had reappeared along with him.

  The shopkeeper grimaced. “The side effects wear off after an hour or so. At least, they’re supposed to.”

  “I don’t know,” Kyja said. She was still unsure about the woman’s motivations. Usually she was better at knowing what people were thinking. But today she was distracted. Nothing felt normal.

  But Marcus seemed convinced. “How much?”

  The shopkeeper tapped the gold with her hammer. About a fourth of the bar split off. “It’s some of my better work, but as I said, it does still have a few flaws.”

  Kyja had to admit, the price did seem fair. She’d seen charms go for more than ten times as much, but usually they were the kind that promised to make someone fall in love with you. People were willing to pay a lot for romance.

  “Done,” Marcus said, pushing the smaller piece of gold across the counter to the woman and giving the rest to Kyja. “If we stand around here much longer trying to make a decision, we are going to get caught.”

  “All right,” Kyja agreed. Waiting here certainly wasn’t an option. For a moment, she considered offering the woman the rest of the gold in exchange for any information she might have on Land Keep or the elementals. But if the Keepers managed to track Marcus and her to this shop, she didn’t want the woman to have any information that might help the Keepers—or that might get the woman in trouble.

  “Don’t forget,” the shopkeeper said as Marcus retied the bow around his neck, “thirty minutes, tops, and you’ll change back. You should start to feel a tingly sensation right before you change. Or not. It still—”

  “I know,” Marcus said. “Has a . . . bark . . . few bugs.”

  Kyja shook her head as Marcus changed back into the spunky little dog. It was a good transformation. If it had been a simple illusion—like most charms—she would have seen through it with her magic immunity. But, as far as she could tell, he was a dog. He still limped on his front left and back right paws, but managed to move quite well.

  “I wouldn’t recommend going back west out the front gate,” the woman said. “The guards aren’t the sharpest, but they still might recognize you and wonder what happened to the boy you came in with. And they’ll definitely want to know how you managed to remove your visitor brand. Try the north or east gates. But do not go south under any circumstances.”

  “Thank you,” Kyja said, realizing she’d misjudged the shopkeeper. She wanted to ask about the south gate, but Marcus was already heading for the door.

  “Come back anytime,” the woman called. She picked up her red hammer. “But stay away from those Keepers.”

  Kyja was afraid that advice might be more difficult to follow than it sounded.

  Chapter 13

  Fun and Games

  Being a dog was going to take some getting used to. It was odd looking up from the level of everyone’s knees. And colors looked all wrong. But the smells were amazing. Have they been here all along? Marcus wondered. If so, how have I missed them? There were hundreds of scents, thousands, and they all seemed to tell a story.

  A young man walked past, and Marcus could tell not only that he’d had lamb chops and carrots for lunch, but that he’d had several servings of a strong drink that made him a little tipsy, that he worked around fires a lot—was probably a blacksmith—and that he’d kissed a female companion in the last few minutes.

  “What are you doing?” Kyja asked.

  Marcus realized he’d raised his nose to the air, sniffing like a, well, like a dog. “Sorry,” he yipped. If Master Therapass could smell things this well as a wolf it was no wonder he’d chosen that form so often. “Where to now?”

  Kyja scanned the streets. “Let’s find other children. Adults ask too many questions, but kids like to tell stories, especially to other kids.”

  Marcus sniffed the air. “This—bark—way,” he said and trotted off down the street with Kyja on his heels.

  Turning up one street and down another, Marcus followed the scent of children like an invisible trail floating through the air. Children smelled different from adults—fresher somehow, like fun and games, while adults smelled like work and worry—serious smells. Of course, children were all over the city, but the trail he followed led to lots of them. He wasn’t entirely sure how he knew that; he just did.

  As he sniffed his way through the streets, he recognized another smell. It was a predatory smell, hungry and intense, like a tiger
stalking an antelope. That, he knew immediately, was the smell of Keepers. Everywhere they’d been, the smell of fear appeared. He avoided the odor at all costs, even if it meant going out of their way and losing the trail of the children for a minute or two.

  They rounded a corner, and Marcus stopped before a large stone building. This was definitely where the children-smell was coming from. He could hear their voices now—shouting and laughing from the other side of the building. Marcus began to trot that way before realizing Kyja wasn’t with him.

  He turned back to see her staring up at the building with . . . what? Sadness? Yes, he could smell sadness coming off her like a bittersweet perfume. But there were also other smells that were harder to read. Longing, anger, jealousy, and . . . even a little fear. Suddenly, he realized what this building must be.

  “This is a school, isn’t it? A place where they teach . . .”

  “Magic.” Kyja nodded, still looking up at the stark, gray building with such a subtle expression of sadness that Marcus wouldn’t have been able to read it if he hadn’t been a dog. “It’s not nearly as big as the one in Terra ne Staric. But it is an academy.”

  “Then let’s go somewhere else,” Marcus said. “I can find some other children. We passed a houseful a little ways back.”

  “No.” Kyja folded her arms across her chest, and Marcus caught a whiff of determination, although the fear was still there too. “We don’t have enough time. You could change back to a person in less than fifteen minutes, and we’ve got to be out of town by then. Besides, this was the right place to come. If anyone here has heard about Land Keep, these kids will know about it.” Kyja strode along the side of the building. “Come on. It sounds like they’re on break right now. But lessons could start again any minute. Let me do the talking. Remember, even in Farworld, dogs don’t carry on conversations. They do tell stupid jokes,” she added with a wink. “But you should be able to handle that.”