Company of Strangers, #1

by Melissa McShane

  Dianthe was waving to them. Alaric nodded, and they proceeded through the gap into what had been the fortress’s courtyard.

  The grass hadn’t taken quite as much control here as in the rest of the town. Enormous flagstones made of some material Sienne didn’t recognize fit so closely together there was barely room for blades of grass to squeeze between. She knelt to touch the stones, which were rough like coarse sandpaper. “I wonder why these have lasted when the others didn’t?”

  Kalanath scraped the steel-shod end of his staff across one. “They feel different.”

  “I bet someone in the city would pay for these.”

  Alaric glanced back at her. “The transport would be far too expensive.”

  “Not if you could shrink them. A fit spell would make them pocket-sized.”

  “Huh,” Dianthe said. “But you don’t know it.”

  “No.”

  “Something to consider for another time,” Alaric said. “We need to worry about getting into the keep.”

  One look told Sienne why Alaric and Dianthe had been so sure no one had gotten into it. The front of the keep was caved in, as if someone with a battering ram the size of a mountain had gone to work on it. The rest sagged alarmingly at the back. The ruins of two towers stood ominous watch over two corners of what was left of the keep; their mates at the other corners were nothing but piles of shattered stone. One wall had crumbled, leaving a hole big enough to climb through. “That cannot be our method of ingress,” Perrin said. “Surely anyone might have entered there.”

  “It’s why we’re sure the rest hasn’t been breached,” Dianthe said. “That’s the obvious way in, but it leads only to a dead end. It was stripped clean years ago.”

  “What about the tower?” Sienne said, pointing at the one at the left rear corner, on the northwest. “It’s mostly intact. Couldn’t someone have gone in that way? Flying, possibly?”

  “They have,” Alaric said. “They reported the interior blocked. And none of us can fly—” He paused, and Sienne shook her head. “No, where we want to go is around back.”

  Sienne followed him, carefully picking her way across the rubble. The back of the keep, which was about eighty feet long, wasn’t as destroyed as the front. It was still a wreck. Worse, it looked as if it might come down if she breathed on it the wrong way. “I don’t see anything.”

  Alaric walked over to one of the larger pieces of rubble, a man-sized stone of green-streaked granite. He squatted, got his arms around it, and heaved it out of the way, revealing a three-foot-tall hole leading deep within the collapsed building, narrow enough that anyone entering would have to sidle through to pass. “Clearing away any more of the stones will collapse the roof, or whatever it is that’s holding the thing up,” he said. “It’s stable for now.”

  Sienne passed him and knelt by the hole. It smelled of dust and dampness but not, she was relieved to discover, of animals. “How long will we be inside?”

  “A few hours,” Alaric said.

  “We should be all right, then.” She stood and opened her spellbook to the fit spell. “I’ll have to cast it five times, so be patient. I don’t think any of us should go in there alone.”

  She had only cast fit a few times before, and then only as a joke she’d played on a fellow student. Now she let the words spill out of her as she focused on Dianthe. Fit was a true magical transformation, not one that conserved mass the way a were-creature’s did, so there were never any worries about finding clothes in the right size or getting hugely fat or skinny. Dianthe’s eyes widened as the transformation took effect. One moment, she was eye to eye with Sienne, and the next she was a little over two feet tall and staring up at her in astonishment. “This is so strange,” she said, her voice squeaky. She drew her sword, which was now less than a foot long. “It altered everything.”

  “Kalanath, you’re next,” Sienne said.

  “It should be me,” Alaric said.

  “You’re going to be last except for me. I’m not sure how small the spell will make you, and it may be…complicated.”

  Alaric’s lips thinned in displeasure, but he only nodded.

  First Kalanath, then Perrin underwent the transformation, both of them exclaiming in surprise. Sienne had never had it cast on her and didn’t know how it felt, though she assumed if it were painful, their exclamations would be different.

  She turned to Alaric, who had his arms crossed over his chest. “You may still need to duck,” she said.

  “Just do it,” Alaric said, his voice gruff and impatient. To her surprise, Sienne realized he was afraid. She’d known he hated magic, but fear was unexpected and out of character—at least, out of what she’d interpreted his character to be. She wished she could reassure him, but that would only embarrass him. She read off the spell as quickly as she dared without ruining it. The taste of honey had turned cloying after four castings. Alaric gasped, and then he was barely three feet tall and breathing as heavily as if he’d been running.

  “Is it enough?” Sienne asked.

  Alaric walked to the hole and touched its roof. “Barely,” he said. Sienne bit back a giggle at how his normally deep, booming voice was suddenly an octave higher.

  “Good, because if I had to cast it again, you’d be really short,” she said. “Give me a minute.” She closed her eyes and spat out the sweetness. She felt only a little unbalanced, which meant she hadn’t tapped her reserves deeply yet. If she had to do many more of those, she’d start to feel the effects, which were similar to illness—body aches, vomiting, dizziness. If she had to do a lot more of them, she’d eventually lose consciousness. Fortunately, she was unlikely to need to.

  She read the spell a final time, focusing on herself. Nausea swept over her, followed by the feeling of falling, and then everything looked different. Her companions were back to being the right size, but the keep was suddenly much taller, and the hole looked the right size to walk through. She juggled her spellbook, which was the only thing she was carrying that hadn’t shrunk. It was now the size of her torso and felt much heavier. She tucked it under her arm and hooked the bottom edge over her hip, like carrying a toddler.

  “We take this slowly,” Alaric said. “Dianthe goes first, to look for any pitfalls or traps. I back her up. Then Sienne and Perrin, you stay in the middle. Perrin, you should be as close to the actual middle of the group as you can, so the defensive blessing will cover all of us if you have to invoke it. Kalanath, you bring up the rear. Keep your eyes open for anything that might come up behind us. Any questions?” His voice was back to being booming and deep again.

  Sienne shook her head. Alaric nodded at Dianthe. “Sienne, could I have a light, please?” Dianthe said. Sienne glanced at Alaric, who was expressionless. She summoned a pale light and set it to bobbing above Dianthe’s left shoulder. Dianthe cracked her neck, a swift movement to each side, then walked forward.

  Sienne waited for Alaric to squeeze through the hole, then followed him, sucking in her breath in a futile attempt to make herself thinner. It wasn’t as tight a fit as she’d feared, not nearly so tight as it was for Alaric, whom she could hear breathing heavily and scraping along the stones. She prayed his passage wouldn’t disrupt anything and bring the roof crashing down atop them. The smell of old stone filled her nostrils, and she breathed shallowly, hoping not to sneeze. Then, like pulling the cork from a wine bottle, she was through and gasping for breath.

  The hole led not to a room, but to a sort of triangular tunnel formed by fallen stones and beams protected from the elements. No. Sienne brushed her fingers across one of them; they looked and felt slightly greasy. Protected by an invulnerability spell. Invulnerability didn’t work on wood more than about half an inch thick, or so she’d thought. It brought home the existence of the ancients more than did a moldering old keep that could as easily have been two hundred years old as four. No wonder the roof hadn’t fully caved in. The beams could be dislodged or even pulled out of their foundations, but not broken.
r />   Alaric’s broad back blocked most of the light from Sienne’s magic, so for her the tunnel was lit only by the scraps of daylight coming through the hole. That faded quickly as they proceeded, until Sienne was walking virtually blind. She resisted the urge to take the hem of Alaric’s shirt for guidance and summoned another light. It cast wan shadows over the triangular space, with the wall of the keep on her left and the fallen remnants of half the roof on her right. The dirt she kicked up as she walked smelled not of fresh, fertile loam, but of dead things, of a place that had lain dormant and sterile for centuries. It made her feel frightened as the darkness had not, and she tried to breathe shallowly, fearing irrationally what might happen to her if she breathed in too much of the dead soil.

  Soon Alaric, who was walking bent over, stopped, and Sienne nearly ran into him. “Door,” he said over his shoulder. Sienne peered past him and saw Dianthe on her tiptoes peering into a lock slightly above her eye level.

  “This may be a problem,” she said. “My lock picks shrank with me. I should have set them aside before you performed the spell.” She drew out a roll of soft suede and unrolled it, revealing a number of slim silvery rods and hooks. “On the other hand, I might be able to fit my fingers inside the lock.”

  “My mother always told me never to put my hands anywhere I wouldn’t put my nose,” Perrin said. “I never understood that saying.”

  Dianthe smiled and inserted a metal rod into the lock, twisting it to one side so a second rod could fit beside it. It bent alarmingly, and Dianthe swore, removed the first rod, and stuck her finger in its place. After a few moments of jiggling, there was a grinding clank, and Dianthe pulled her finger and the rod out and pressed down on the door handle. “That’s just unnatural,” she said.

  “Just so we’re inside,” said Alaric.

  Beyond the door lay a kitchen that in Sienne’s current size looked cavernous, the ceiling high enough to be beyond the reach of her magic light. One corner of the room was collapsed on itself, with a broken table rotted nearly to sludge under a fall of stone that blocked most of a doorway. An iron stove, pitted and orange with rust, took up half the opposite wall. Another door, this one untouched, stood dark and forbidding directly opposite them. It was black with age and its iron hinges, unlike the stove, were grimy but not rusted. The entire room smelled sharp with rust and decay.

  Alaric stood with his hands on his hips surveying the stove. “We need to find a way up,” he said. “There’s at least one intact section of roof, and the distance viewer should be up there.”

  “Well, there’s the door,” said Dianthe, pointing.

  Perrin, who was standing beside the door, touched it. “The wood is weak,” he said. “Punky, I believe is the word.”

  “Let’s see if the frame is solid,” Alaric said. Sienne watched as the three men felt along the arched stone of the doorway. She directed her light to give them more illumination and looked around the room. Something gleamed beneath the broken table. Curious, she crossed the room and knelt beside it.

  “Sienne, what are you doing?” Dianthe said, sounding alarmed.

  “Just exploring.” Whatever it was had a coppery sheen to it. She worked her fingers under the rubble and felt something soft and damp surrounding what felt like metal chips. Cringing, she pulled out her find. A coin, impressed with a sheaf of wheat on one side and the profile of a woman on the other. She showed it to Dianthe, who’d joined her. “I think there are more. But they’re just copper.”

  “Yes, but in excellent shape. There’s high demand for ancient coins regardless of metal.” Dianthe held out her hands as Sienne pulled five more coins out of the rubble.

  “We need to move on,” Alaric said, coming up behind them. “This spell won’t last forever.”

  “It will last for six hours,” Sienne said.

  “Look what Sienne found.” Dianthe displayed the coins. Alaric picked one up and examined it.

  “Very nice,” he said. “A little salvage, at any rate.”

  Once again Sienne felt warmed by his approval and had to remind herself that his good opinion wasn’t any more important than anyone else’s. She might not hate him, but she certainly wasn’t going to idolize him.

  Dianthe handed the coins to Sienne. “Your find, you hold onto it,” she said.

  Sienne put the coins into her bag and followed Dianthe to the door. The wood was indeed punky, and the men had opened the door by way of simply breaking off chunks of wood until only bits of it hung from the black metal hinges. Dianthe stepped through, Sienne’s light bobbing along after her.

  The vastness of the empty space beyond the door swallowed up the tiny magic light. Dust and debris covered the stone floor, made of the same material as the flagstones outside. Sienne gaped at the ceiling, which looked like a night sky, complete with bright stars. It took her a moment to realize the light specks were gaps in the collapsed ceiling through which sunlight shone. It would have been enormous even had she been her correct size.

  Perrin and Kalanath had drifted past her toward the fall of beams and slates that was the wrecked front of the room. “It is like a tomb,” Kalanath said, his voice hushed.

  “I notice there are no cobwebs,” Perrin said. “If even the spiders dare not live here…”

  “It’s just an old ruin,” Alaric said. “Don’t let it get to you. Sienne, we need more light.”

  Sienne created a few more lights so each of them had one hovering near their ear. Alaric gestured. “It’s this door,” he said. “We’ll see how accessible that tower really is, then go from there.”

  The door in question was heavy oak banded with iron, its hinges rusted and its doorknob fallen off. It was unlocked and made to open inward, inconveniently given the lack of handle. Alaric wedged one finger in the hole left by the missing knob and pulled. The door swung open, and a groaning creak echoed through the room. Everyone froze, looking up at the ceiling. It groaned again, then was still. No one moved. Finally, Dianthe said in a low voice that wasn’t quite a whisper, “Move carefully,” and went through the doorway.

  This room was much smaller and, to Sienne’s relief, had an intact ceiling. Rotted leather covered a collapsed chair behind a table whose contents Sienne was currently too short to see. Empty lantern cages rusted quietly on every wall. The faint wind generated by their entry made the remnants of tapestries hanging on the walls shift, sending up eerie shadows when the magic light fell upon them. What might once have been a carpet had turned black over the centuries. The thought that she might be the first to tread this carpet in four hundred years left Sienne breathless.

  Alaric gestured to Dianthe, knelt, and cupped his hands together near the floor. Dianthe stepped into his cupped hands and balanced effortlessly as he lifted her to look at the table. “Nothing,” she said. Alaric lowered her to the floor and dusted off his hands. “Looks like there might have been something once.”

  Alaric looked grim. “That could mean the tower was accessible, after all.”

  “Let’s keep looking,” Sienne said. The reality of being in the keep had finally sunk in. Despite what Alaric and Dianthe had said about the place being cleaned out, she couldn’t help imagining what it would be like to find something remarkable. She’d found the coins, hadn’t she? Which meant there might be other overlooked things.

  There was another door, much smaller, adjacent to the one they’d entered by. Dianthe opened it easily. “Damn,” she said, stepping aside for the others. “It’s clear.”

  Sienne followed Alaric and Perrin through to a narrow, cramped space filled with broken stones and splintered wooden boards. A progression of holes wound its way up the stony sides of what had to be the northwest tower. Chunks of wood sticking out from some of those holes told her they had once been stairs, and when she peered up into the dimness, she saw intact steps circling the tower’s interior, starting about eight feet up. A square of light brightened, then dimmed, then brightened again the way a door slowly opening and closing with the wind might
do.

  “That’s it,” Dianthe said. “We’re too late.”

  10

  “We cannot be certain of that,” Perrin said. He tilted his head far back to look at the tower’s nearly invisible roof. “Just because it is possible for a wizard to fly does not mean one gained access to the keep that way. We should not give up.”

  “Alaric?” Dianthe said.

  The big man was staring at the steps, which would have been well above his head even if he had been his normal size. “No,” he said, “no, we shouldn’t give up. If someone had found the distance viewer, Master Fontanna would have heard about it. So either it’s not there to find, or no one’s found it, and either way, we need to continue the search. Which means getting into one of the other towers.” He turned around and left the room.

  Back in what was left of the keep’s great hall, Alaric said, “Spread out. Let’s see what other doors we can find.”

  Sienne trailed after Kalanath, who moved with swift confidence to the far side of the hall. “There is one here,” he announced.

  “And another here,” said Dianthe.

  Alaric paced the perimeter of the room. “Neither of those leads directly to the other intact—mostly intact—tower. Let’s see which is more accessible.”

  One of the doors was locked. “Give me a minute,” Dianthe said. “Damn, but I wish I had a box to stand on.”

  Sienne watched her go to work on the lock, adding her light to Dianthe’s, though it didn’t seem lock picking depended much on light. Dianthe said, “Still glad you came along?”

  “This is so exciting!” Sienne said. Dianthe laughed.

  The others came to join them. “It was another kitchen,” Perrin said, “and the blocked door in the first presumably led to the pantry that lies between them.”

  There was a soft click. “Let’s see about this one,” Dianthe said, pushing the ancient door open.

  The room beyond was totally bare, without even the remnants of furniture. Another door across from the first hung slightly ajar. Something about the room struck Sienne as odd, but she didn’t realize what until Alaric said, “No dust.”