Company of Strangers, #1

by Melissa McShane

  “Let’s do it. We’re about out of options,” Dianthe said.

  Perrin nodded. “I suggest the rest of you stand outside. My faith in this blessing does not extend to taking unwarranted risks.”

  They all moved into the corridor and clustered close together, watching Perrin. He backed up to the blocked doorway, shook his head, and moved forward again until he stood near the center of the room. He held the paper blessing high above his head, and in a clear voice said, “O Lord, we are in a bind, so if you would be so generous, stop being a cranky bastard and be useful for once.”

  Violet light flared, filling the room with a blinding radiance matched only by the white fire consuming the blessing. Sienne cried out and covered her eyes, and heard the rest of her companions curse or exclaim as well. The black inverse of the light pulsed behind her eyelids. Jasmine and sharp mint filled the room, making her gag at its overpowering sweetness. “Dear Lord,” she heard Perrin say faintly, “I did not expect this.”

  Sienne lowered her arm. The room, which had been so bare before, now radiated pale violet light from hundreds of lines scribed all over the walls, ceiling, and floor. Some were curved, some straight, but all were done in a bold hand that made Sienne think of a master calligrapher scribing lines of text across a clean white sheet of paper.

  She realized why she’d had that image when her eyes fell on a word written along the curve of a line. As she looked more closely, she saw more words, all written in a clear half-uncial script familiar to her from her studies. She walked forward and touched one of the words that fell at about eye level to her. “Sienne, be careful,” Dianthe said.

  Whatever medium the words and lines were written in, it didn’t come off on her hands. She sniffed the wall and smelled wet stone where the word was. “It’s in Ginatic,” she said. “I’ve never seen the script so easy to read, though.”

  “You can read it?” Alaric said, coming to stand beside her.

  “Not really. I know about a hundred Ginatic words, mostly spell names, so I can make out simple phrases, but it’s not a language anyone speaks but a few scholars. This—” She brushed her fingers across the word again—“this is adpriti, open.”

  Alaric stepped back and tilted his head to look at the ceiling. “What other words here can you read?”

  Sienne circled the room, then walked down the center of the floor gazing at her feet. “Adpriti is all over the place. So is silla, force, and premma, shift.” She came to a stop near Perrin, still standing at the center of the room, and craned her neck back to look at the ceiling. “They’re all spell names.”

  “Spell names?” Alaric’s alarm was evident in his voice.

  “Just the names,” Sienne reassured him. “I can’t cast force by saying silla. The spell itself is in the evoking language. But I wonder…” She returned to Alaric’s side and contemplated the word adpriti. “I wonder if this isn’t instructions of some kind. For example, stand in this place and cast open.”

  “You mean a ritual,” Alaric said.

  Startled, Sienne said, “I didn’t—” She stared at him. His face was expressionless, but his eyes were fierce in a way she’d never seen before. “That’s…you’re right. That’s what a ritual is.”

  “So what does this ritual do?”

  “I have no idea. The only rituals I’ve ever seen written out are necromantic ones, and that was only to warn us students what to watch out for.”

  “Then make a guess.”

  Alaric’s intense gaze was starting to make her afraid. Sienne swallowed and turned away, pretending to examine another section of wall. “With open, force, and shift, I guess you could…alter something. Something big. Shift is a confusion spell that lets you change your appearance in small ways. Hair color, face shape, things like that.”

  “So could you do this ritual?” Dianthe said. She sounded as eager as Alaric had not.

  “No. For one thing, there’s no clue as to when each spell has to be cast, or on what. For another, I don’t know force or I’d have used it on Conn Giorda.” She turned to face Dianthe, who was chewing her lower lip in thought. “And even if I could do all that, I’d be nervous of performing wizardry when I didn’t know what it was for.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Alaric said.

  “What?” said Dianthe.

  He turned to look at her and shook his head slightly. Dianthe subsided. “Why doesn’t it matter?” Sienne demanded. “You were looking for ritual, and you found it.”

  “It is not the right one,” Kalanath said. He was standing quietly in one corner, where a series of lines came together in a complex knot.

  “How do you know that?” said Dianthe.

  He shrugged. “It is clear you look for one kind of ritual. This is not it.”

  Alaric’s lips were compressed with frustration. “No, it’s not,” he said. “And we’re no closer to finding a way out.”

  “I do not think so,” Kalanath said. He set the tip of his staff on the corner of the nearest flagstone and pressed down. There was a click, and the flagstone’s opposite edge rose two inches. Dianthe gasped. Alaric and Perrin stepped forward at the same time, then stopped as Kalanath bent and pulled up on the flagstone. It rose, swiveling around an invisible axis, until it stood at right angles to the floor, revealing an opening blacker than midnight. Stale air that smelled of char and smoke drifted out.

  “How did you know that was there?” Perrin said.

  “The lines here all point to that spot,” Kalanath said. “It is a sign.”

  “Sienne,” Alaric said, “make a light.”

  Sienne conjured a light above the hole. Alaric knelt and looked down. “Stairs,” he said, and a room.”

  “Not a tunnel?” Dianthe asked.

  Alaric shook his head. “There’s not much space down there.” He took hold of the flagstone and pulled. “And I can’t remove the stone. Whoever this place belonged to must have been tiny.”

  “Or knew the fit spell,” Sienne said. “How better to protect something than to make it impossible for anyone to get at it?”

  Alaric sat on the edge of the hole and swung his feet down to rest on the stairs. “Sienne, can you make me fit through here?”

  “Only by making you a lot smaller. You’d be less than a foot tall. But I bet I can fit in there.”

  She could see him marshalling objections behind his eyes. Dianthe said, “She is the smallest of us, Alaric.”

  Alaric grimaced and pushed himself up. “Be careful,” he said.

  Sienne nodded and set her spellbook to one side. She knelt by the edge of the hole and looked down. The magic light revealed very little beyond some angular shapes that might have been a cupboard and table. She swiveled around and lowered her feet to rest on the second step down. The stairs were steep enough they might have been a ladder, and after a moment’s thought Sienne turned and climbed down them that way. The spaces between the steps, or rungs, were small enough that she was convinced her theory about fit was correct.

  She reached the bottom and made a few more magic lights. The floor was bare earth, as were the walls. The smell of old smoke was stronger here, and when her eyes adjusted to the light, she saw why. A fire had ravaged the place long ago, blackening the cupboards leaning against the walls and mostly destroying the narrow table filling the center of the room.

  “It’s been burned,” she called up to her companions.

  “On purpose?” Alaric said.

  “I can’t tell. But I think the air ran out before the fire could completely destroy everything.” Books with soot-stained spines filled a bookcase opposite the stairs. Sienne circled the table—there was no sign of chairs or stools, not even heaps of ash that might once have been chairs or stools—and drew one of the books out. The spine came away from the pages, blackening her fingers. She wiggled the pages free, dropping the rest of the cover on the floor. The book was small, which meant it was average-sized to her current form, and the pages were burned on the edges that had been facing
out into the room. She carefully turned a few pages. Pictures of flowers and plants she didn’t recognize met her eyes, their lines as bright as if they were new.

  “I found books, but they’re mostly ruined. I can’t tell how old they are,” she said. She checked a couple of other books, but they were in worse shape than the first, all of them apparently botanical reference books. Histories, those might have been worth salvaging, but these struck her as ordinary and worthless to collectors.

  She turned her attention to one of the cupboards. It held a row of soot-blackened lumps too regular to be chunks of coal or burned wood. She removed one and brushed it off with her fingers, felt smooth glass and cold metal, and rubbed harder. It was a palm-sized disk of heavy two-inch-thick glass in an engraved metal cuff studded with grimy pearls. She lifted it to her eye and saw through the glass not the opposite wall, but black nothing. A weak trail of white light outlined the engraving and grounded itself in one of the pearls. The black nothing shivered, then lay still again.

  Sienne set the glass disk down and picked up another soot-encrusted lump. It proved to be the twin of the first glass disk, but with cabochon tiger’s eye stones instead of pearls. “I found artifacts,” she exclaimed. “Six of them!”

  “Do they still work?” Perrin asked.

  “I don’t know. Some of them still have traces of magic.” She carefully stowed them in her pack, brushing as much soot off as she could before wrapping them in her spare shirt.

  “Time to figure that out once we’re free,” Alaric said. “Do you see any sign of another exit? A secret door?”

  Sienne crossed to the last cupboard, whose upper shelves were empty. “Just a minute.” She opened the cupboard doors and sucked in a horrified breath, stumbling backward. The body in the cupboard was small, smaller than she was, and curled in the fetal position so it would fit inside the cupboard. It was shriveled and dried out, resembling nothing so much as a withered apple. Its sunken eyes were closed, its lips peeled back to reveal yellow teeth, and its clothing had disintegrated. In its nakedness it looked pathetic, like a child hiding from the darkness of a thunderstorm.

  Sienne’s breath came in heavy, gasping pants. “There’s a body,” she said.

  “Sienne, be careful,” Alaric said.

  “It can’t hurt me. I think there’s no other way out of here, or it wouldn’t have hidden from whoever burned the place down.”

  “That’s a pretty extreme leap of logic,” Dianthe said.

  “I know. And maybe that’s not how it happened. But…” Sienne couldn’t think how to end that sentence.

  Feeling obscurely that she ought to dignify this person’s death with some kind of acknowledgement, she approached the cupboard and knelt beside it. The small hands were clasped together as if in prayer. Sienne swallowed and reached out to touch its head in farewell. Something glinted in the shifting lights around her head, something clutched in the tiny hands. Hesitant, Sienne took hold of one of them and pulled. It snapped off in her fingers, making her cry out. “Sienne!” someone shouted.

  “It’s all right, I was just startled,” she said. She withdrew a pendant the size of a fat pea pod from the remaining hand. It was a dark blue stone set in silver, faceted rather than smooth, and it glittered in the lights like goldstone. Its shape was irregular, twisted, and reminded Sienne more of ancient wood worn smooth and hard by time than of a gemstone. If it had hung from a chain once, the chain was long gone.

  Despite her increasing belief that there was no way out of this room but the one she’d gotten in by, she circled the space, checking the walls for secret doors, even tugging one of the cupboards down after removing all the books. Finally, she clambered up the stairs and sat, breathing heavily, on the edge. “I’d be more excited about this,” she said, handing the pendant to Alaric, “if I thought we were in a position to sell it. It has a magical…I guess you could say ‘residue’ on it, like someone cast a spell on it once, but it’s not inherently magical. Even so, I’m sure someone will want it.”

  Alaric turned it over in his hand, then passed it around for the others to handle and examine. “I agree,” he said. “We seem to be out of options.”

  Dianthe turned abruptly and walked across the room, then back again. “Sienne, can you explain more about that spell Conn used on the rocks?”

  Mystified, Sienne said, “Um…it’s pretty much what I said. It shapes magical energy and directs it into a target. A person, or a building…any one thing. I think there’s a version that can strike multiple targets at once, but none of my teachers knew it. If you cast it on something that breaks, it becomes sticky—meaning it persists, clinging to the pieces like a web. That’s what happened to the tower. It broke apart when it fell, so the magic is still there.

  “So it’s a single piece of magic? Not a lot of little pieces, each attached to a stone or beam?”

  “No. It’s all one thing.”

  Dianthe stopped in front of Alaric. “There’s a way out.”

  Alaric’s face went expressionless again. “No.”

  “It’s that or starve to death in here.”

  “Why did you not tell us this before?” Perrin demanded. “If you know a way out, why would you not take it?”

  Alaric was silent. “This is no time for secrets,” Kalanath said.

  “We’ll stay here,” Dianthe said. She put her hand on Alaric’s cheek and made him look at her. “I swear it.”

  “What is going on?” Sienne asked.

  Alaric let out a deep sigh and bowed his head. “No,” he said again, but this time he sounded resigned, as if he were facing the gallows. “We’ve risked our lives together, and now we’re facing death together. You’ve trusted me to bring you this far. I should be able to return that trust.” He took Dianthe’s hand and squeezed it. “Let’s go.”

  Sienne caught Perrin’s eye. He looked as confused as she felt. Trust them with what?

  They followed Alaric back to the tunnel. “Stay at this end,” he said. “It’s going to be a tight fit. Sienne, is there any chance of the shrinking spell wearing off in the next fifteen minutes?”

  She checked her non-functional pocket watch again out of habit. “Um…no. We have at least half an hour, I think.”

  Alaric nodded. He unstrapped his sword and leaned it against the stone wall of the keep. “Stay back,” he repeated, and walked toward the collapsed stone. Dianthe had her hands clenched into fists. Sienne wanted to ask her what Alaric intended, but the look on her face, as if she’d said a final goodbye to her oldest friend, dissuaded her.

  Alaric stopped about a foot from the end of the tunnel, just before he would have had to crouch to keep from hitting his head. He stood with his back to them, his shoulders flung back and his stance wide. Sienne’s eyes watered from staring so hard at him. She wiped her eyes and blinked. The watery sensation was still there, only now she realized it was coming from the air around Alaric. A low hum purred through the ground, vibrating her bones until she had to clench her teeth to keep them from rattling. His outline blurred as if seen through water, stretched—and the world blinked, and he was gone.

  Sienne covered her mouth to hold back an astonished gasp. In his place, formless in the low light, was something much bigger, four-legged and massive and dark brown that became black where the shadows struck. Sienne took in the powerful hindquarters, the long, muscular neck, and the black tail that switched impatiently at nonexistent flies. It was a stallion, filling the end of the tunnel almost to capacity. Then it turned its head to look back at them, and this time she did gasp. Rising from its forehead, scraping across the stones overhead, was a horn that shone like black oil in Sienne’s magic light.

  12

  Dianthe’s hand closed on Sienne’s arm like a vise. “Don’t,” she said, and went silent. Sienne didn’t know what Dianthe thought she was about to do. She couldn’t stop staring.

  The unicorn turned away and lowered his head. The bulk of his body prevented her from seeing what he was doing, bu
t after a moment, yellow-white light traced the outlines of all the stones at that end of the tunnel. A rumble like thunder echoed, and the stones shifted. Sienne and Perrin shouted a warning, and Kalanath took a swift step forward. The unicorn’s hindquarters shifted, and he backed toward them, gradually raising his head. Sienne caught one more glimpse of the impossible black horn.

  Then it vanished, and there was only Alaric, striding toward them without meeting anyone’s eye. He picked up his sword and slung it across his back. “The magic is gone,” he said. “Let’s clear a path.”

  Sienne looked at Perrin and Kalanath. Perrin’s eyes were wide and stunned behind the hair that was once again falling in front of his face. Kalanath’s face was a still mask of astonishment. She was sure she looked like she’d been struck by force herself. She turned toward Alaric, opened her mouth, and shut it again. Too many questions thronged her brain. Alaric the shapeshifter. Were-creature? And how had he removed the magic, just because he was a… Her brain refused to process the concept of “unicorn” linked to the man she was coming to like despite herself.

  Dianthe had already gone to join Alaric. Kalanath shrugged and followed them. Perrin whispered, for Sienne’s ears alone, “My eyes were not deceived, were they?”

  “No.”

  “Then how—never mind. But I do not think I can look him in the face again.” He went to join the others at the rock fall. Sienne picked up her spellbook and followed.

  Alaric worked in grim silence, daring anyone to speak to him. Dianthe divided her attention between shifting rocks and glancing sidelong at Alaric. So, Dianthe had known. Sienne didn’t waste time wondering why neither of them had mentioned Alaric’s secret. If she didn’t want anyone to know who she was, how much more must Alaric want to keep that secret? It was astonishing that he’d revealed it at all. Dianthe had been right, Alaric could have made them all stay away while he did whatever it was, and they never would have seen his transformation. It was a mark of trust that made Sienne feel horribly uncomfortable. She wasn’t sure she deserved it.