“What?” Edmond’s voice rumbled like thunder. “Where is he?”
“How should I know, you blithering fool? I was busy saving the princess while you lay unconscious like the greatest glump!”
Then Martin called to them from where he stood over Rhoswen. “She doesn’t look dead, but she is as still as death.”
“She’s fallen into an enchanted sleep,” Arabella said.
“Probably for one hundred years,” Lona added. “But who knows?”
“Ah!” Martin nodded then shrugged. “Seems fitting. What are we going to do with her?”
“I’m definitely not taking her,” Lona said. “I’ve done my share.”
Edmond turned to Arabella and asked, “What do you wish us to do with her, Your Majesty?”
Arabella felt a little thrill in the pit of her stomach. Your Majesty. It was true. Though not yet crowned, she was queen of this land. She drew herself together, calling to mind the strength of her father, the courage of her mother, and all of the virtues with which she had been born, not magically blessed.
“We will take her back to White Thorn Castle,” she said. “She will be safe there until we understand her curse better and can make an informed decision.”
Edmond nodded. “May it be as Your Majesty wishes,” he said. His face took on the solemn expression he wore when deep in thought, but he took her hand in a gesture of affection and respect. Such a small token, but powerful. Peace and courage flowed into her heart, and, if possible, she loved him even more.
“We must go to White Thorn anyway to arrange the coronation.” He smiled at her then, tenderly and with just a hint of teasing in his eyes.
“There’s something else we must do first,” Lona said, brushing feathers from Edmond’s shoulders as if they were pesky flies.
“Yes,” Arabella agreed. “We must get cleaned up. I cannot go anywhere looking like this.”
“No, no, no!” Lona shook her head so that her wild hair danced like a briar in a storm. “We have to get you two married.”
Arabella stared at her in amazement. “Just like that?”
Edmond put his arm around her waist. “Consider this, darling: My father can hardly force you to marry my brother if you are already married to me.”
At this Arabella laughed, but she still asked, “Will he be satisfied to let us live in peace?”
Edmond shook his head and shrugged; but before he could answer, Lona interrupted with a snort. “Of course you won’t live in peace! Who ever heard of a married couple being peaceful? What with that great lummox Martin clunking about the castle, Lady Rhoswen lying around collecting dust, and the collection of spoiled children you’ll no doubt produce in no time at all, it is well for you that I shall be there to help.”
Smiling, Arabella reached out one arm to catch Lona in an embrace. “Yes, indeed. I will need you more than ever, my dear friend!”
MICHELLE PENNINGTON spends her days quoting movies with her husband, making messes faster than her four kids, and generally tolerating General Lee, the family’s autocratic cat. She puts up with him only because apparently it’s a thing for authors to have a cat. Michelle loves to make magic by stringing words together, but she also creates designer sugar cookies, sings loud in church, and reads fiction as if it’s her last day on earth.
To learn more about Michelle and her work, visit:
www.Michelle-Pennington.com
To Alex, Graci, and Morgan, whose help and encouragement made this story possible.
Chapter 1
THE HOVERCAR SOARED OVER purple-leaved trees, but Tanza didn’t care about the planet’s autumn splendor. She pulled on thick black plasti-skin gloves, slid her feet into human-made boots, and secured the pack over her shoulder. She straightened seams, charged tech, and ran over the plan one more time, so that when the dome appeared through the foliage, all she had left to do was smile.
“Oh, aren’t you a beauty?” she whispered.
The morning sun brought out the veins of color—pink and purple, blue and green—in the dome’s smooth white stone. Thorns choked the building beneath as if even nature wanted to protect the splendor inside.
Nature could deal with disappointment.
Tanza gripped the steering column, resumed manual control, and landed the compact metal hovercar on the forest floor in a whirl of fallen leaves.
Keffer’s voice crackled through the hovercar’s comm system. “You’ve landed?”
Tanza pressed the reply button on the console. “Light as a drift bug.”
“She look like a winner?”
Tanza smiled. “She’s made of aurolith.”
Keffer whistled low and long. “Someone had a lot of money to burn.”
“And a burning need to take it with them, I hope.”
“You ready to go in?”
Tanza tried not to be offended. She failed. “Of course I am.”
“Your hair tied back? Remember the Tekka job.”
Tanza ran a four-fingered hand over the brown curls safely gathered within her hair binder. “I will never forget the Tekka job. Especially since you’ll never let me.”
She could hear the smirk in Keffer’s voice. “Someone’s got to keep you humble, charit.”
Tanza cringed as Keffer’s human tongue mangled the tephan term of endearment. Keffer had worked on Arateph so long that he spoke Common Tephan in daily life, but no human could manage the tephan naming tongue. With their less complex vocal cords and less sensitive hearing, humans could neither hear nor speak the lower layers of sound in the complex language tephans used to construct their names. Humans looked so similar to tephans that Tanza sometimes forgot how alien they were.
She said, “I’m shutting down comms.”
“Just this once, take comms inside.”
“Impossible. Comm units cause havoc with security nets.”
This wasn’t true, but as long as Keffer believed it, Tanza could do these jobs in privacy. She couldn’t skim off trinkets for herself if her employer watched her every move.
Since Keffer had never visited a tephan tomb, he still fell for the excuse. “Wouldn’t want my best supplier fried even for the sake of hearing my dulcet tones.”
“Me neither,” Tanza said and slammed the comm system’s kill switch. She didn’t have time for chit-chat. She had a tomb to rob.
She left the hovercar and approached the tomb with swift, emotionless efficiency. Long experience had given her laser focus. On a tomb job, she had no emotions, no outside concerns. Nothing existed except the contest between Tanza and the tomb’s defenses.
She cast an appraising eye at the tomb. Judging by the dome’s design, the tomb was about one hundred fifty years old and built by those who hired the most expensive designers. Although it stood far from any of the old Houses, Tanza knew she’d found the family tomb of one of the last lords of Arateph. The security would be formidable—the greed of Arateph’s nobility lingered long after death.
A wall of annet branches with thorns as thick and long as Tanza’s hand surrounded the edifice. Tanza circled the tomb twice before glimpsing a door. She reached into her pack for a compact metal cylinder and unfolded it into a blade as long as her forearm. When she pressed a button, a shimmering coat of blue energy surrounded the blade and cut through the thigh-thick branches like paper, revealing a set of double doors wide enough for five people, blocked by heavy metal bars. Tanza touched the bars and brilliant light flashed, but the energy pooled around her gloves and fizzled into nothing. Without the gloves she’d have been paralyzed for an hour at least.
She activated the security field again and this time tracked the strands of energy to the left of the door. Constantly testing the energy field, she cut another path through the branches and located the field’s source box behind an aurolith panel at the base of the wall.
Lying flat on her stomach, Tanza tore away the panel and examined the control box. It seemed a standard neuroblock model, though the number of switches, screens, and blinki
ng lights made her adjust her estimate of the tomb’s age: barely a century old. She could deactivate this neuroblock model with her eyes closed. She reached for the leftmost switch on the top row.
A white light blazed and the world spun. Tanza’s stomach heaved and spread her breakfast on the forest floor beyond her left arm. Afterward she rested her head on her folded arms, every nerve quivering as she gulped in five desperate breaths. Then she rose unsteadily to her hands and knees, wiped her face, and gave the panel a look of grudging respect. She hadn’t seen a stunner on a control box since the Tekka job.
“Nasty little thing, aren’t you?”
Fighting dizziness and her heaving stomach, she reached into her pack to pull out a syringe of hospital-strength nausea medication, then brushed the red micro-sensor covering one end of it over her left elbow. When the sensor beeped wildly, she knew she’d found a vein. Tanza injected the dose of medication then tucked the syringe back into her pack. In minutes, her head cleared and she remembered how to outwit the stunner.
She used an annet thorn to pop off a piece of the plastic in the top right corner of the control box, revealing a screen and several small buttons, then scanned it with her Coalition-issue program scanner—a formidable computer shoved into a brown plastic box that fit in her hands. The modern decryption technology broke through the ancient security measures in minutes and provided the stunner’s shut-down code.
After neutralizing the stunner, Tanza blazed through a complex pattern of switches and buttons on the field’s main control panel; the next time she touched the tomb wall, she felt nothing except bare stone. The neuroblock field was down.
She returned to the entrance and pulled at the bar across the right-hand door. As expected, it didn’t budge. She beat a staccato pattern across the bar until a laser-light grid—sixteen little boxes, each with a different symbol—appeared on the metal. These were the oldest and most common electronic locks on tephan tombs, and Tanza had long ago learned to defeat them using a glitch in the hardware.
She held a square mirror—precisely the size and shape of the pad of laser-light buttons—just above the bar and passed a hand between bar and mirror from all four sides. Then she held the mirror against the buttons for a count of three. The laser-light symbols faded, a series of heavy clanks sounded from within the tomb, and Tanza pulled open both doors . . .
. . . to reveal another set of doors as white, flat, and solid as those she’d just opened. These were secured with fifteen mechanical locks. Tanza had never before seen a tomb with so many on the inner door. She couldn’t rely on her knowledge of historical security technology to get past these locks; there were no standard configurations to research or glitches to exploit. Nothing could help her now except old-fashioned trial and error.
Tanza tore off her gloves and grinned. She loved this part. This was pure thievery, with only her fingers and instincts to guide her as she listened to tumblers, picked locks, and felt her way around knobs and switches. Since the tomb sat miles from any living soul, she could luxuriate in the challenge.
Tanza didn’t enjoy much about her chosen profession—she scraped to pay the bills, kept company with untrustworthy people, and only by constant vigilance evaded the authorities—but she loved the challenge of tomb robbing. Usually, tephans from the charity houses were hired only for mindless menial labor, but Keffer’s jobs made use of Tanza’s intellect and love of history. Keffer had taught her the art and science of thievery, and she had taught herself the history behind the tombs and their contents. Though she liked research more than robbery, this was her favorite moment of a job, when the mechanical locks challenged her with one last puzzle of pure skill. If she solved it, she could claim the tomb’s riches. Little in life was so straightforward.
After two hours’ work, the last lock fell away and Tanza pulled open the doors. She reached into the darkness and found a panel to the left of the door; if the security systems were operational then the lights would be too. The heat from her hand activated the switch, and the hall blazed with light.
The glory nearly struck her blind. Even the inside walls were made of aurolith. Its colors glittered at her from every direction, a silent promise that the riches inside were even rarer than the walls that hid them.
Tanza shut the doors behind her. She might be miles from another living person, but she felt certain that such blazing beauty could be seen from space. Ten locked doors lined this hallway alone, and a staircase held the promise of further wealth on a second floor. Dozens of nobles could have filled the chambers with expensive honor gifts. After seven years of tomb robbing, it took a lot to impress Tanza, but this tomb set her heart fluttering like a drift bug.
She rushed toward the closest door, her imagination reeling with visions of the life this tomb could buy her. No more dusty tombs, no more Keffer. A mansion somewhere in the mountains, a whole fleet of her own hovercars, enough money that the humans had to let her take a history degree.
But inside the chamber she found only two canvas chairs and some plastic wrappers. The chamber looked like a campsite, not the final resting place of one of Arateph’s nobles. There wasn’t even a coffin shelf.
The next two rooms were no better, offering only a metal washtub, some buckets, old food wrappers, and a portable cold-storage box. She could make no sense of it. Had a homeless person taken up residence? But surely no squatter could have outwitted all the security measures.
She found the first corpse in the fourth room. Atop padded sheets on a waist-high coffin slab was a young man’s body clothed in a white burial robe. The man was no older than thirty, without a sign of decay on him. This wasn’t unusual in newer tombs. Sentimental or queasy families sometimes opted for preservation fields to keep the body fresh.
Yet Tanza had never seen a body look so little like a body before. His cream-colored skin was smooth and supple. His long, muscular limbs seemed relaxed. His bright gold hair hung slightly over his eyes. His jaw was square, his nose blunt, his lips full. He seemed familiar, but she couldn’t trace the resemblance. She’d probably robbed one of his relatives.
Tanza turned her attention away from the corpse and toward his coffin slab’s preservation field. She pried away the front panel of fake woodgrain, knelt to examine the parts, and was baffled yet again. She felt like a complete amateur as she stared, uncomprehending, at this preservation field’s unfamiliar tangle of plastic, metal, and wires.
Finally, near the center she recognized a power cell. She pried out the pink metal cylinder with a lock pick and cradled it in her palm. This power-cell brand had gone out of business after Arateph joined the Interplanetary Coalition, but enthusiasts found the old brand more reliable, more efficient, and more valuable than modern versions.
Tanza shuffled the still-hot power cell between her hands. Once it cooled, she clutched it in one hand and kissed it. “No offense,” she told the corpse. “You’ve been pretty long enough. This beauty’s going to buy me my own hovercar.”
She hid the power cell in a side pocket on her supply pack. Keffer wouldn’t get his hands on a treasure like this.
She pried a few more parts out of the preservation field then snapped the front panel back in place. The room contained nothing else of value, so Tanza shot the corpse a final salute and moved to the room across the hall.
This room contained piles of long, shallow wooden boxes, almost like jewelry boxes. The first box held a selection of thin metal rods—scalpels, picks, needles. The next box contained several syringes, the ancient medications long ago decayed and evaporated.
Tanza gaped. Medical tools? What kind of tomb was this?
She grabbed a strange tool from the floor. The ornately carved wooden handle was thick, round, and curved in the middle. A thin metal skewer protruded from the handle’s flat end, and the light danced on its oily sheen. Tanza brushed her thumb across a bump on the base of the handle, and the skewer gave an electric buzz.
Tanza dropped it and jumped back, heart racing. That was n
o medical tool. That was a spindle. A real, working spindle, the gory feature of every revolution-era drama. One stab of that skewer and one press of that button would activate an energy pulse that could shred a person’s organs in thirty seconds.
Spindles had been outlawed on the planet since Arateph joined the Coalition, but groups like Cornerstone still used them, believing tephans should fight for independence with a true tephan weapon, no matter how brutal. That spindle was more valuable than the power cell, more valuable than anything Tanza had ever taken from a tomb.
She would never touch it again. Any person who would buy a working spindle wasn’t someone she wanted to sell to. Keffer could never hear about this.
She turned her back on the spindle and rifled through the boxes of antique medical tools, falling into a quiet rhythm as she searched for anything of value. Most people found tombs eerie, but Tanza luxuriated in the peace.
A man’s voice, deep and smooth, flowed through the silence. “I beg your pardon, but are you robbing me?”
Tanza’s heart seized. The tools clattered on the floor. She whirled around to see the corpse standing in the doorway.
Chapter 2
THE YOUNG MAN, BURIAL robe hanging to his knees, looked as hale and healthy as if he hadn’t been dead a few minutes ago. His golden hair and white robes glowed in the tomb’s light. He looked at Tanza with wary amusement, as if uncertain of proper etiquette toward one’s tomb robber.
Tanza couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. Couldn’t process the reality before her.
“You . . .” she rasped. “You were dead.”
“I’m afraid not,” he said, spreading out his hands.
She gave a harsh, cynical laugh, the kind she saved for Keffer’s tougher cronies, because laughing was a better plan than going mad. “I never believed in ghosts, but this tomb would be the first to have one.”
His lips twitched in amusement, but his eyes showed concern—a mischievous but not cruel spirit. “I swear to you, I’m not a ghost.” He held out his hand. “Here, touch me. I’m flesh and bone.”
Five Magic Spindles: A Collection of Sleeping Beauty Stories Page 32
