“Gentlemen, you heard Her Highness,” he said, stepping out from behind the desk and shooing them as if they were unpleasant vermin. “Unless you have a room here, you are not welcome.”
“We’d like a room!” the shorter one said quickly, elbowing the taller one who nodded in agreement.
“Not today, gentlemen. We’re fully booked. I’d advise you to reserve your room ahead of time in the future.”
“But you’re letting her have one,” the shorter man grumbled as the clerk shut and locked the doors with the two men on the outside.
“Thank you for that,” I said, giving him an appreciative look. “And sorry to have caused you so much trouble.”
“No trouble at all, Your Highness. It’s my pleasure to serve. I’m afraid our penthouse suites are taken, but I do have a nice room on the fifth floor. It is likely not up to your standards, but it has a nice view.”
“It sounds perfect. Thank you, er...”
“Alex, Your Highness.”
His voice was fast and slightly high pitched, but he bubbled over in enthusiasm. I liked him immediately. I followed him up the stairs, grateful I only had a small bag to carry and gave him a tip as he opened the door to room 509 and handed me the keys.
Despite being located on a back street, the room was pleasant enough and, as the clerk had said, had a great view of the city over the roofs of the nearby buildings.
After throwing my bag down on the bed, I headed to the window to get a better view. I stepped out onto a small balcony. In the far distance, I could just about make out the tower of Urbis. It was one of the major landmarks of Urbis, situated in the central business district, right in the middle of the bullseye I’d seen earlier from up above. It looked so tiny from this distance even though I knew it to be the tallest building in the whole of Urbis, perhaps of all the kingdoms. I’d climbed it once with my father on a royal visit. Thousands of buildings stood between me and the tower. I counted the steeples. Almost a dozen, and those were just the ones between here and Inner Urbis.
Urbis was laid out in three distinctive districts. Inner Urbis was the place I knew best, having visited it a number of times on royal visits. This was where the elite lived and where all the laws were passed. The center of the bull’s-eye was the most affluent district anywhere in the twelve kingdoms, and the people that ran it were, in a way, more important than the royals of each kingdom. The kings, queens, presidents, and prime ministers of each kingdom could make up any laws they wanted, but all of them had to be passed through the Urbis government. Inner Urbis was sophistication at its finest with the buildings there made of brilliant white stone and marble. The next circle outward and the largest of the Urbis areas was Middle Urbis. This is where I was now. Hundreds of thousands of people lived here, all going about their daily business. I heard a staggering statistic once. Most of the people living in Urbis never left the giant walls that surrounded it. Seeing the mass of humanity sprawled out in front of me, the dirty streets, the shops, the apartment buildings, it made me feel sad that the people that lived here missed out on so much. The magnificent mountains of Draconis, the beautiful flowered fields of Floris, the magical sky islands of Skyla. And of course, the sands of Badalah. I couldn’t imagine spending my whole life within the confines of a walled city, even one as big as Urbis.
In the opposite direction to Inner Urbis was outer Urbis. I couldn’t see it from where I was standing on the small balcony, but it was there, behind me somewhere. The derelict houses, the slums, my birthplace. As I looked out over miles of urban landscape, it hit home just how much of a job I had ahead of me.
5
28th June
Alex sent a complimentary breakfast to my room, along with a note saying he was available for anything I might need. I’d asked him the day before for solitude, and he’d been great about leaving me alone. Now, I needed answers. The map I’d bought was way too huge to sift through the thousands of street names. I needed help.
Down at the front desk, Alex bowed when he saw me.
“Your Highness, I trust you had a restful night?” His face was lit up with a thousand-watt smile, and he stood to attention, ready for whatever I was about to ask him.
“Perfectly. Thank you for the breakfast. I was wondering if you’d be able to help me?”
His eyes shifted to the door of the hotel. I followed his line of sight to find a crowd of people, most of whom had cameras.
“I’m sorry to say that we haven’t been successful in keeping the reporters away. I could send a messenger to grab you a carriage, and you could leave through the back door if you want to.”
I sighed. Finding my birthplace was going to be hard enough as it was without a mass of reporters on my heels.
“It wasn’t quite what I wanted, but I wonder, would you be able to come up to my room to aid me with something?”
I’d planned to show him the map right there on the counter, but I didn’t want a posse of reporters gawking at my every move.
Alex raised his eyebrows but nodded. After telling some unseen person in the back office that he was running an errand and asking them to watch the reception desk, he followed me back to the room.
“I’m sorry to ask you to come up here,” I said, rolling the giant map out on the low coffee table in the middle of the suite. “I need help with this. I wonder. Are you from Urbis? Do you know the streets well?”
“Born and raised, Your Highness,” he said, sitting next to me on one of the low couches. “I know some of the areas pretty well. This is where we are now.” He pointed to an area about halfway between the giant outer wall of Urbis and the bullseye of Inner Urbis.
“Where is it that you are looking for?”
“A street with the word maple in it. I don’t know if it’s Maple Street, Maple Avenue, Maple Crescent, or what.”
He looked at me strangely, but let me continue talking. “The houses on the street are made of brick. They aren’t kept very well. The wooden frames on the windows have peeling paint. There’s a steeple in the distance.”
“Ok. It sounds like you are thinking of one of the streets around the outer edge, before the wall. The older districts have rows of houses made out of brick. The problem you have is that we are talking miles and miles of houses. Urbis is much bigger than any other city. It’s almost a kingdom in its own right.”
“I can see that,” I said with a sigh. The map not only covered the table but hung down off the sides of the coffee table and draped onto the floor. “Do you know any Maple Streets?”
He shrugged but then offered me a good-natured grin. “No, but I can help you look. My break is in fifteen minutes, and the assistant manager can watch the reception until then.”
We each took a side of the map and scoured the tiny street names, looking for anything that mentioned the word Maple.
The minutes passed, turning into hours. Alex left when his break was over, coming back on his lunch hour with a coffee and a sandwich for each of us.
“Any luck?”
“Not really,” I said as he passed me the sandwich. “The street names are so small I can barely read them, and there are thousands of them.”
I took a bite of the sandwich, keeping my eyes on the map. “What about you? Is it madness down there? I’ve not dared look out of the window.”
“It’s not good,” Alex admitted. “I think every reporter in town has wind of you being here. I can’t get them to leave as they aren’t on the property, but they are stopping the guests from coming and going. I’ve dealt with four complaints this morning already.”
I glanced up at him, ready with a sorry on my lips, but he gave me a smile, which I returned.
“Can you think of anything else at all that might help us?” he said, dripping some sauce from his sandwich onto the outer edge of the map and hurriedly wiping it off with his thumb.
“Nothing I can think of. Just the white steeple and the brick...”
“White steeple? It was white? You sure?”
I thought back to the magical memory Genie had conjured.
“Yes, I think so.”
The clerk stood. “If you’ll permit me, please follow me.” He held his hand out for me.”
He led me out of the room and down to the end of the corridor. A vase of flowers sat on a windowsill at the end. Alex pulled the gauzy curtain back a crack.
“Did it look like that?” he said, pointing to the far right.
In the distance, I saw a number of steeples, but only one was white. The others were grey or brown.
“It could be, but surely there are a great many steeples in Urbis that are white.”
“That’s true,” the clerk said, closing the curtains again before any reporters noticed us. “Many of the places of worship of the gods in the central district have white steeples to match the other white buildings, but that steeple you saw wasn’t in the inner district, it was in Outer Urbis. That is the only white steeple I know of in that area. It’s also the only steeple I know of that isn’t for a place of worship.”
“It’s not?”
“No,” he said as we walked back to my room. “It’s a nightclub. It used to be a church, but about twenty years or so ago, it was sold. The developer who bought it turned it into a nightclub. It’s actually quite well known. People from all over Urbis go to it.”
I ran back to my room and the map. “Can you point it out for me?”
He sat down and ran his finger over the map. I watched with bated breath as his finger finally stopped.
“There!”
I circled around the table to where he was sitting on the floor and looked at the small symbol that depicted a steeple. A circle with a cross on the top.
“It’s still showing as an actual church on this map.”
I barely looked at where he was pointing. Instead, my eyes scoured the map of the area nearby.
Finally, I saw it a short distance away. “Look!” I said, my voice brimming with excitement. “Maplechase Park!”
The clerk slapped a hand to his forehead. “I know that park. Why didn’t I think of it? There’s a Maplechase Crescent nearby too. A friend of mine used to live in that area before I moved here.”
I looked down again. In the area, I found a Maplechase Road, a Maplechase Lane, and a Maplechase Drive. The writing was so tiny, and the streets so narrow that there could have been more, but at least, I was in the right area.
I stood up.
“Shall I hire you a carriage?” Alex asked, his eyes brimming with excitement. “It’s a long way to travel. It will take you days on foot.”
My own excitement waned. Days! I didn’t want to be here for days. I needed to find out the information and get back to Badalah.
“How long will it take in a carriage?”
The clerk shrugged his shoulders. “If you set off straight away, you might get there very early tomorrow morning.”
My face fell. It still wasn’t quick enough. I didn’t want to spend all night traveling. I’d already been gone two nights.
“You could take the train,” Alex suggested. “It’s maybe a couple of hours away. The trains are fairly frequent, and there is a station just around the corner from here.”
I followed the tiny train line on the map and saw that one of the lines went to the area I needed to be.
“Thank you!” I said, folding the map and slipping it into my bag. “I’ll do that. Please hold my room. I’ll probably be back late.”
“My pleasure. Come on. I’ll take you out of the hotel’s back entrance. No point in letting the media know where you are going.”
I pulled on my coat, and the pair of us dashed down the stairs to the hotel kitchens. The chefs working there looked up in confusion as I ran through with Alex.
At the back door, he pointed to a small stone building up the street.
“If you run, you might be able to catch the half-past one train. If not, there’ll be one at two-thirty.”
I thanked him again and dashed up the cobbled alley.
The train station wasn’t like the broad white buildings I remembered from my trips here in the past with scores of train lines snaking through them, the arteries of Urbis. This station had just two tracks and a small ticket office. As I got to the office, the sound of a train approaching filled the air. I looked down at my watch, a gift from my parents on my last birthday, to see that it was twenty-nine minutes past one.
“A ticket to here please,” I said, pointing to the district on the map that I’d just unfolded. I didn’t even know the name of it.
He gave me a bored look and gave me a ticket from his machine.
“Three dollars,” he said, holding his hand out.
“Can I buy a return?” I asked as a great steam train pulled into the station. He gave a sigh and pressed a button on his machine.
“Six dollars.”
I fished in my bag for my purse and handed over the money. People began to file past me as I stepped away from the ticket office. Most were heading down the platform away from the train, but some, like me, were waiting until we could board. When the last person headed past, I stepped up the small step onto the train.
Along one side, a long corridor ran the entire length of the carriage with compartments taking up the other side. I opened the door to one, relieved to find it empty. The ticket collector hadn’t recognized me, but that didn’t mean no one else would. It seemed that the troubles of my own kingdom had not reached here yet, and I didn’t want to gamble on being followed. As I let the thought go round in my mind, the platform outside the train filled with people. I ducked down, but it was too late. I recognized some of the reporters from the hotel. Somehow they’d found me. I willed the train to move off quickly before any of them could get tickets, but it felt like a painfully long time before the train began to rumble, and we pulled out of the station.
I sat, waiting for the inevitable rush of reporters to my compartment, but after ten minutes had gone by, I relaxed. Maybe they hadn’t seen me at all, or maybe they hadn’t been able to purchase a ticket in time. I sat up straight in my chair and watched the streets of Urbis whizzing by.
I saw an Urbis I’d never seen before, and I wished I had time to stop and explore. Every so often we’d stop at a station and people would get on and off, but no one ever tried to come into my compartment. Every time we stopped, I looked up the name of the station on the map, following the tiny train line drawn on it and counting down the stations until my stop. Two and a quarter hours after I’d started my journey, the train pulled into the station I’d memorized as being the closest to the area with the streets named Maplechase.
I stepped off the train, hoping to get some fresh air, but one deep breath and a lungful of sooty air later, I had to step away from the train. The streets in this area were nothing like the posh streets in Inner Urbis, but they were also a far cry from the shopping area where I’d spent the last night. There were shops here too, but nothing like the boutiques that lined the main street near the hotel. These were a cobbled-together mishmash of buildings, none of which looked like it would stand up to a strong gust of wind. Still, a thrill of anticipation ran through me. The buildings were made of brick. Pulling out the map, I found the station I’d just come from and traced a line to the first of the Maplechases.
Behind me, I heard my name being shouted.
“Princess Gaia!”
I turned to find a dozen flashes, nearly blinding me. The reporters and photographers had been on the train after all. They’d just waited to see where I’d get off before announcing themselves.
I turned away from them and ran. Yes, I could have stood up to them, but they’d never leave me alone. Running was my only option. I took off down a back street, glad that I was wearing jeans and not my traditional dress. I’d had no idea just how much my dress hampered me until now. Behind me, the paparazzi chased me as I ran through the unfamiliar streets, ducking and weaving around the evening shoppers and various animals that seemed to be everywhere. Dogs, c
ats, even chickens, sheep, and goats. The streets were even narrower here than they were in the mid-part of Urbis and the buildings were taller, blocking out most of the light. I turned corners, keeping my speed up, getting lost, and all the while they followed, keeping up with me despite me running as fast as I could. The further I ran into the winding maze of streets, the darker it became until I could barely see anything in front of me despite it being the afternoon. The coldness I’d felt the other day crept up on me again, but this time I kept it at bay with the heat of my magic. I turned, anger burning me up. The reporters stopped short when they saw me watching them. Some of the people with cameras brought them up, ready to take another shot of me, but I was too quick. Pulling all my magical energy into my core, I shot it out. A huge ball of fire hurtled at the men, causing them to run away from me. I was a fire woman! I turned back to my original direction and carried on running, this time only stopping when I was sure they wouldn’t be able to find me. I dropped to the ground, and sat with my back to a shop wall, out of breath as a shopkeeper opposite me gave me a quick nod then shut his door, turning the open sign to closed.
Exhaustion filled me, partly from the running and partly from the expending of energy the ball of fire had caused. Now that I didn’t have the heat of magic to keep me warm, the strange coldness surrounded me, turning my breath to vapor. I lowered my head, bringing it to my knees and pulled my jacket more tightly around myself, all the while wishing I’d never left the comfort of my home and started on this ridiculous journey. I wasn’t helping the people of Badalah; I was on a wild goose chase. I missed Genie. I missed my mother and father. I missed my own bed.
Something landed on my shoulder with a soft thump, and the coldness drifted away. Pulling my head up quickly, I saw it was Asher.
“Asher! How did you find me?”
Asher whistled and nuzzled his feathery head against my cheek. I reached up and stroked his head, never more glad for the company.
“You flew all this way and found me.”
Gaia: Daughter of Aladdin Page 15
