The Aperture

Chapter 2

A Strange Kind of Kidnapping

Agent Connie Bain felt as though had fallen down a flight of stairs. And all was dark. She also had a splitting headache.

She opened her eyes and stared up at a high, arched ceiling. It was made of an orange stone, painted, organic, and lovely. It arced into a five-pointed arch at the center of the room. Where is this place? she wondered.

She sat up quickly and looked around. At once she was nearly overcome by a hazy sense of vertigo, as though she had quickly risen after waking up from a very long sleep. No doubt she had taken a nasty bump in the head. She wondered who had done this to her. She felt her head for bandages. There was no bandage and no injury to her head, for that matter, but her hair felt like it had a different texture.

After the vertigo had subsided somewhat, she took in her surroundings. She was lying on an incredibly soft bed in a woman’s bedroom. Rectangular tables made of beveled, green-swirled marble lined the walls. A strikingly pretty, ornate rug with diamond-shaped patterns flowed across the floor. It wasn’t Oriental, it wasn’t Middle Eastern, and it wasn’t European, but something like all of those and, at the same time, like none of them. Something in the air smelled sweet to her. The scent was a peculiar mixture of patchouli and bananas, but she liked it.

Gingerly, she slipped off the bed onto the ornate rug. The colors in the rug seemed excessively bright to her, so she tried not to look. She found that she was wearing an azure gown with two strips of lavender leather-like material that started at the shoulders and extended in two strips down to the base of the hem. The wide strips looked vaguely like suspenders, but they were more likely decorative in nature. She squeezed the azure fabric between her fingers. The material felt like it might be silk, but she was not sure. She noticed a difference in her hands. Though her hands were anatomically correct, they were not her hands. They were too lithe and delicate-looking to be hers. Most strikingly, she now had long fingernails painted purple. This was most peculiar. If she really had been kidnapped, she wondered why her captors had gone through the trouble of applying false fingernails and then painting them purple. She understood the reason for being gagged and tied. Her training with the CIA had prepared her for that. But what’s with the purple fingernails? Then she wondered for a moment if she was only dreaming. Some things did not make sense.

Waiting for her on the floor at the bedside were a fancy-looking pair of shoes that appeared to be an accident of moccasins and patent brown leather loafers. They looked smaller than the shoes she normally wore, but her stocking-covered feet seemed smaller too. She slipped her feet into the footwear. They fit perfectly.

At once, she realized she was incredibly thirsty. Nearby were a basin and a crystal urn, half filled with a clear liquid that she assumed was water. A row of cobalt-colored glasses lined a shelf above. She gradually realized there were a great many books in the room. A few of the runes on the books reminded her of those on the bracelet confiscated in Professor Layton’s lab. She poured herself a glass of the clear liquid. She brought it to her lips and took a deep drink. The liquid had no flavor, but the texture felt different in her mouth. It definitely wasn’t water, but it slaked her thirst just the same.

Connie poured herself another glass of the liquid and studied the books. She found she could read the runes on their spines: “The Thxias Book of Astronomy,” the “Glzpell Torsas Book of Spiritual Lens Creation,” and a large black book called “God Breathed.” The light was growing brighter outside, a light green glow.

Connie went to the window and drew back the gauzy violet curtain that covered it. The glass beyond was opaque, but the room was bathed in a bright blue-green light from the sun that shone behind it. She unclasped the latch on the window and pushed. It opened easily. She gasped at what she saw outside the window. Before her stretched a lovely city of sparkling emerald towers, arches, and spires of silvery gold. Beyond was a string of ice-capped mountains. I was one of the most lovely sights she had ever seen. But the most lovely sight was a yellow sunrise framed by the richest shades of green and blue she had ever seen. The sunlight felt warm and soothing on her face. Already, the splitting headache she felt when she woke up was beginning to dissipate.

She got down on her knees and stared out the window. Was this the place Professor Layton had told her about? If so, how did she get there? She tried to recall what had happened to bring her to the odd place where she now resided. The last thing she remembered was putting on the strange, heavy bracelet, and then everything went black.

She scanned the room for a telephone. Though there was no phone, she did see a plethora of oddball trinkets and other items scattered throughout the room. Whoever lived in the room was an avid reader and a pack rat.

Feeling hungry, she scanned around the room for something to eat. Then she spotted a mirror set into the wall by the door. Did she dare want to see if her face had been altered? She thought she might as well look. She stood up from the window and walked over to the mirror. For a few seconds, she thought she saw a stranger looking back at her in the mirror. The stranger had black hair with green highlights. Her cheeks were smooth, and her cheekbones were high and prominent. The complexion was fairly white with a tinge of green. Her eyes were sea green, and her lips had a strangely subdued shade of pink. Alarmed by the appearance of the stranger, Connie ducked away from the mirror, wondering if it wasn’t actually some sort of trick electronic device. She raised herself to look into the mirror again. This time, it was her face she saw, albeit a bit pale. Relieved, she stood up again. Now she noticed a wide array of beads of all shapes and colors and thumbnail-sized plates interwoven within the strands of her hair. On closer inspection, she saw that many of the plates had cryptic runes on them. She surmised that it must have taken someone hours to weave the beads and plates into her hair.

Connie noticed she wore earrings too—three per lobe, small, loopy silver affairs. Not bad. She bared her teeth. Her nice teeth were unchanged, but with the bad taste in her mouth, she wished she had a toothbrush. She stood back from the mirror to get an overall picture of her body. To her dismay, she looked somewhat scrawnier than she remembered. She thought this was a peculiarity of the mirror until she squeezed her upper arm. Gone was her well-tuned, athletic figure. Now she was small-boned, lithe, and almost frail-looking, emaciated by comparison to the way she used to look. The azure robe she wore seemed to almost hang on her like a rag draped over a stick. She cradled the womanly flesh of her chest. Instead of the 34C she was used to, she felt only the slightest swell of her breasts. A chill of alarm ran through her. Either she had lost a lot of weight in the wrong places or someone had done breast reduction surgery on her. If surgery had been done, she did not feel residual soreness from the operation, nor were scars evident. In either case, she realized she must have been unconscious for a great length of time.

She picked up the glass, imbibed some more of the liquid, then went back to bed and sat down to think about her predicament. It occurred to her that someone wanted her to believe she was in the land Professor Layton told her about. If he were telling the truth, she was now breathing chlorine, and if the chemistry were correct, the clear liquid she was drinking was probably hydrochloric acid. She contemplated the liquid in the glass. She sniffed it; it had no smell at all. She took another sip from the glass. This time, she let the liquid rest on her tongue for a few seconds before swallowing. As far as she could tell, it possessed not even a slight acidic sour note. For all practical purposes, it was water. She laughed out loud at the fleeting belief that she might be drinking hydrochloric acid. She halted her laughter abruptly as the sound issued from her mouth. Her voice sounded much different. It was much lighter and softer. The rhythm of her laugh was different too. For an instant, all this startled her. Then she laughed again. She decided that maybe all of what she was experiencing was a hallucination. That would explain why she saw a stranger when she first viewed herself in the mirror. Her surroundings did seem to have an otherworldly, surreal quality about them. Perhaps she was back at her apartment, dreaming. Yes, that was it. She was dreaming it all up. Just wait until she told her partner, MacGregor, what she was seeing! She laughed some more then fell back on the bed.

Just then, someone rapped at the door to the room. She looked at the door, suddenly frightened. She did not reply. Did this dream also come with a cast of actors to act out some psycho-symbolism hidden deep within her subconscious? A number of packed bags sat by the door as though someone was about to embark on a trip. She waited. The rapping came again, this time more insistent than before.

“Alyndia? Are you ready?” a male voice asked from behind the door.

Where was Alyndia? she wondered. She looked around the room. There was no one else there but her.

“Alyndia?” the voice came again. “Let’s go. They’re waiting for us.”

The man’s words sounded strange and awkward. He wasn’t speaking English, yet she understood him just the same.

“Alyndia’s not here,” she said. Her own voice sounded foreign to her.

The metal latch flipped up, and the door opened. She saw a mature, slightly overweight man wearing a brown fur jacket and baggy leather trousers. His skin possessed a slight tinge of green. His hair was a light shade of brown, and his narrow face was framed by thick, dark eyebrows and a tuft of blue-black beard at the extreme end of his chin. He had a dull, scuffed-up metal breastplate strapped to his chest. He wore sandals and carried a small pack. He looked ready to travel. To her, he looked like a rejected extra from Monty Python’s Search for the Holy Grail, yet his face looked unmistakably familiar. She felt like she should know him; it was a feeling not unlike déjà vu.

When the man set eyes on her, his look hardened. “Enough of this nonsense, Alyndia. Let us depart. The sooner we get this over with, the better.”

“Are you calling me Alyndia?” She looked around the room once again to ascertain whether she was the one he was referring to.

“You don’t see another Alyndia in the room, do you?” he asked, his voice laden with irritation.

He bent over and started laboriously picking up her bags that were sitting by the door. She lazily leaned up against a table.

“I think you are mistaking me for the wrong person.”

On hearing this, he stopped picking up the bags and looked at her. “What are you talking about?”

“You called me Alyndia. Right? I’m just stating that my name is not Alyndia.”

He scrutinized her for a moment, shook his head, and resumed picking up the bags. While struggling to lift all the bags, he accidentally dropped one. He cursed. He tried to pick up the errant bag while struggling to maintain his grip on the others. “You can help me with these, you know.”

“Why should I?”

“Because you are going on a quest and will need them.”

“I don’t know anything about a quest.”

“Alyndia, you cannot back out of it now. Have you so soon forgotten about your debt to the Academy?”

“I paid off my student loans years ago,” Connie said. “Furthermore, I don’t give a rat’s ass about any quest.”

The man stopped lifting her bags and glared at her, his expression a mixture of surprise and anger. “Since when do you speak with a foul tongue, Alyndia? Such language is not becoming of a lady sorceress.”

“A sorceress? Me?” Connie let out a raucous laugh, or at least as raucous as her strange, new ultra-feminine voice would allow. “I might be able to do a card trick for you.”

“You are obviously not in good spirits today. So be it. Let us go now. You have a task set before you. They are waiting for you in the street as we prattle. And if you do not go now, you can carry your own packs down the stairs.”

“Who are you?” she asked. Just as this question left her lips, his name popped into her mind: Jalban. And he was her “uncle.” She did not know why she knew his name or his supposed relation to her, but it was most certainly him. At least the name seemed appropriate for him. Any more than that, and he was still a stranger to her.

“Enough of these games. Alyndia, let us go now,” he commanded.

She thought this over for a bit then decided to go along with the ruse. She had nothing to lose. Besides, she somehow felt she could trust Jalban. She drew a long sigh and rose to her feet. When she did, she accidentally knocked over the cobalt-colored glass of clear liquid on the floor next to the bed. “Oh!” she said as the liquid flowed across the lovely carpet. Unsurprisingly, the liquid did not burn the carpet but merely soaked into it as if it were water. If the liquid were acid, the rug would be smoldering by now. This was further proof that the liquid was not hydrochloric acid.

She picked up the bags Jalban could not carry and followed him past several doors in a mostly featureless hallway. The building they were in seemed like a kind of low-rent tenement, and hers was a studio apartment within this tenement. She gathered that the person named Alyndia who occupied the apartment was not successful in whatever she did. They descended a flight of stairs and passed through a crescent-topped portal out into the street below.

There on the cobblestone streets was a bearded man who looked to be in his thirties, sitting on a big, shaggy-haired creature. The beast looked like a three-way cross between a horse, a camel, and a llama, with floppy ears and a large, bony bump on the bridge of its nose. It was called a hanyak! She could not say how she knew the proper name of this unfamiliar creature, but that’s was it was called.

Connie turned her attention to the bearded man sitting on the hanyak. As it was with Jalban, she was sure she’d never met him before. He was a tall, muscular man with a close-cropped beard, bushy, thick black eyebrows, and straight hair tied in a ponytail at his neck, the tail of which he kept draped over his left shoulder. His face had a dark, sun-burnt appearance. For his rough features, his nose was well-shaped, masculine, almost Roman, and ended with a slight natural flare. He was dressed for action; he wore a five-jointed breastplate, leg greaves, and high leather boots, and he had a full-face helmet attached to the saddle of his hanyak, along with a spare sword to boot. Jalban introduced him to her as Rahl the Swordbearer, which Connie found apt, as the man obviously carried a sword.

Without further hesitation, Jalban tied her packs to the spare hanyak. They mounted and started along the road called the Circle of the Elements that wound through the city called Roggentine, then they went down a smaller road called Potter’s Way. A colorful panorama of sights filled Connie’s eyes, and a swirling cacophony of alien sounds fell upon her ears.

She had some difficulty keeping herself steady on the beast she rode. She could not get over the sight of the creature. Ostensibly, it served the purpose of a horse, but it looked nothing like anything she had seen in any of the countless foreign countries she had visited in service for the CIA. The saddle was made of a material that looked like leather but felt more like slippery vinyl. An imitation leather saddle, she thought. It is very strange, just like everything else has been since I woke up this morning.

A man named Rahl rode over to her. Now they were riding side by side. She looked away from him while she pondered her situation.

“Lady, I hear you are a practitioner of magic,” Rahl said.

Connie said nothing but continued to look ahead. On their right, they passed a bearded, fat merchant dressed in a green robe and a skinny prospective buyer dressed similarly, loudly bickering over the price of a brightly colored clay urn. The skinny buyer was interested in the large urn. The fat merchant proffered a smaller, less ornate urn for the price offered for the larger. They traded insults interlaced with counteroffers. Their words sounded strange, rough, and foreign to her mind, yet she understood them.

“Foolish merchants,” Rahl said of the two men after they had passed. “So you lived in Roggentine all your life?”

Connie frowned. How should she respond? “Well, yes—I think,” she replied, not knowing nor properly caring if this was the correct answer.

“I’m from Dyandall.”

“Dyandall,” she repeated, feeling the words on her tongue. The name did not sound familiar at all.

“You probably haven’t heard of it unless you traded with the bardin,” he added, reading her confounded expression. “It’s a small village sixty leagues west of here.”

“However far that is,” she said.

“It does not appear that you venture out very often, lady. I hear you are a sorceress. Would it be proper to ask how long you’ve practiced magic?”

“How should I know?” she retorted. “I don’t even know what the hell I’m doing here.”

Rahl smiled at her. “A feisty sorceress, you are,” he said. “A not altogether uncommon trait for one who practices magic. Which discipline are you? Are you one that can control animals?”

Jalban broke in beside them. “She is not that kind of sorceress. She’s a prestidigitator of the elements. And maybe she resents your uncouth manner in questioning her as you are.”

“Ah, the lady is an elemental sorceress,” he said, disregarding Jalban. “Alyndia the elemental sorceress—one who searches for nodes beneath rotting logs in the forest,” he added mirthfully.

Connie shook her head. She had no idea what they were talking about. It seemed like everyone in this place was a lunatic. She burst into a sudden burst of laughter at that thought. Once she started laughing, she could not stop. Jalban gave Connie a puzzled look and Rahl a look of consternation. Rahl returned the stare, and then he too broke out in laughter. This seemed to anger Jalban. He gave the hanyak a kick and rode slightly ahead of them.

They turned right off Potter Street and were now on the main street that seemed to bisect the city. Though this avenue was much wider than Potter Street, at fifty or so paces wide, going was slower. The cobblestone avenue was choked with rickety wood carts overloaded with goods, pulled by weary looking beasts of burden, tethered livestock animals, people carrying packs, and beasts of burden. The sides of the streets were lined with kiosks covered with brightly colored, open-sided square tents. Within these tents, merchants purveyed all sorts of items, including birdcages, ornate rugs, crystals, and wood figurines. Now the sun was rising higher in the lovely green sky, with only a few wispy clouds to the north. It became warm. Connie caught sight of huge, open wood gates in the high, whitewashed stone city walls.

Rahl rode last, behind their pack hanyak to watch for pickpockets. Next was Connie. Jalban rode ahead of them, cursing the unlucky souls who were blocking their path. Still, it was slow-going. Connie smiled to herself. He would make an excellent New York cab driver. Then she frowned. Where is New Jersey from here? She studied the architecture of the buildings, with their curved roofs and wavy glass windows. Most remarkable was the absence of telephone wires, radios, televisions, or even a simple western shirt or pair of jeans. There were no signs of aircraft in the sea-green sky; just a lone hawk or vulture circled high overhead. This was most certainly a backward country, almost medieval, a place where modern technology had not yet penetrated. Yet, despite the uncanny remoteness of the country, she was fluent in the language. She thought that perhaps some kind of mind control had taken place after she put on the bracelet. It was possible that Professor Layton was involved in some sort of covert organization that was based in this country. But why they should go through all the trouble to kidnap her and let her loose in this strange country was beyond her—her CIA training did not prepare her for this—and they even somehow altered her perception of the sky. Still, no matter their tactics, no matter what sort of mind games they played with her, no matter what they did to her, they would never, ever break her. She thought of jumping off the hanyak and dashing off into the crowd to lose Jalban and Rahl. She judged she could lose them easily in the throng. Possibly, she could locate a phone in a nearby city or village closer to civilization. Then she decided against it. If she were really a captive in this foreign land, then Jalban and Rahl were also the solutions to the quandary she found herself in. And what was this ‘Alyndia the Sorceress’ bullshit? Were they really in cahoots with Professor Layton? She decided to play along with their game to see where the situation led.

While she pondered her surroundings, she felt a sudden, visceral tug toward one of the kiosks. The thought of water became foremost in her mind. She instantly felt thirsty. She turned her head to look. There, she saw an old man sitting on a high chair. Hung from supports within his square tent were dozens of tiny, sealed, azure jugs. Connie halted the hanyak and stared at the kiosk, trying to fathom her attraction to the jugs. The old man seemed to notice her instantly. His weary, old eyes locked on hers. He gave her a wry, haughty, toothless smile. To Connie, it seemed as though he could read her, and he knew just what she needed. He climbed down from his high chair and braced his feeble body with a staff, waiting for her with expectant eyes on a rude table ringed with the tiny jugs. She saw that the man was exceedingly short and hunched over. That’s why he sat on the high chair; it was so that he could survey the crowd, possibly for passersby like her who had a strange attraction to his wares.

She was just about to get down from the hanyak to go to the man when Jalban called out to her from ahead, just above the din of the crowd bustling around them. “No, Alyndia! You can get your own later!”

Connie turned to him. “What?”

“We don’t have time for that,” he said. “You can find your own on the way there. Let’s go.”

Jalban sounded like he meant business. She turned to the old man at the kiosk. His eyes were still locked on her. Connie fought an almost overpowering urge to go over to the man to discern from him the yearning she felt inside.

“Alyndia!” Jalban called to her again.

This time, she heard the anger in his voice.

“Better get moving,” Rahl said from behind her. “He’s probably overpriced, anyway.”

Reluctantly, Connie pulled her attention away from the man and started the hanyak forward behind the path cleared by Jalban ahead of them. She looked back longingly one last time at the man and the azure jugs. His eyes were still on her, a hurt expression on his face, before their visual connection was broken by the mass of flesh in the street. The acute thirst she felt subsided. Presently aware of this feeling, she kept feeling the nudge she felt at the kiosk. As they passed the numerous merchants, occasionally she felt a burning sensation of fire beneath her skin, then water again, buoyancy in her limbs, and then the gritty sense of someone lightly rubbing gritty sandpaper on her skin.

Finally, they reached the great wooden gates. Here the throng thinned, and they could move more easily. Rahl guided the pack hanyak between him and Connie, and they rode forward three abreast.

On either side of the gate, just outside small, ornate shacks, the fresh-faced young men armed with halberds stood guarding the gates, collecting a tariff for those who entered without a writ of citizenship. There were eight sentinels in all, dressed brightly with shiny breastplates glinting in the sun. Each wore a giant plume of feathers in his metal helmet, with the top vaguely reminiscent of those helmets worn by the Spanish Conquistadors. Seven of the sentinels wore green feathers. One of them, presumably the leader, wore yellow. They passively watched those leaving through the gates. Somehow, Connie knew the men as lower-ranking members of the city garrison, although she did not know why she knew this fact. Jalban, Rahl, and Connie passed through the gates with no more than a slight nod to her from one of the green-plumed sentinels.

Connie expected the crowd to disperse far and wide once they left the city, but beyond the walls stood even more buildings with kiosks set up in front. A quick scan of the structures outside the walls revealed them to be less ostentatious and of lower quality than those located within the walls. The appearance of the crowd took a similar turn.

Immediately to the right, they passed three low, circular fountains arranged in a triangular pattern. At the edge of each fountain was a hand-crank pump made of brassy metal. A sign planted by one of the fountains displayed a semi-crude drawing of a hanyak with an “X” drawn through it. Townswomen waited at the fountain with their buckets, talking amicably among themselves. Two of the women, one plump one with striking green hair wearing a yellow and brown striped medieval-style dress and the other, a thinner but less comely, bonneted version of the other, paused in their chat and smiled winsomely at Rahl.

Now they rode straight into the new throng. The sun felt hot on Connie’s shoulders and face. She spotted a floppy hat made of green reeds attached to a pack on the hanyak between them. Assuming it was hers, she plucked it off and stuck it on her head.

They traveled a short distance later. A skinny young boy wearing a threadbare smock rushed up to them, holding out his hand. He had lovely straight green hair, big green eyes, and a face with delicate features. “Money, lady,” he pleaded. “My mother has a fever. She cannot move. I need money to take her to the temple of Thedamas.”

Connie halted the hanyak. “Why do you need money to take him to the temple? Why don’t you take him to the (?!)” Connie drew a blank on the word doctor. She could not find the expression for the thought she meant to convey to describe a man who heals through scientifically proven processes. Something lower and more autonomous in her wanted to say “healer” or “acolyte,” but this spoken word did not seem to have an equivalent meaning to what she really wanted to say.

The boy gazed at her, seemingly trying to fathom her thoughts. Then he spoke again, his voice more pleading than before. “Please, lady, if you could spare only a half-pence, I would be eternally grateful to you.”

“I very well doubt you need to take your mother to the temple,” she said to the boy. “You should take her to a doctor instead.”

The boy looked at her with a puzzled expression. “Who is doctor?”

“Someone who heals you. I will give you money if you go to the doctor, but not if you’re going to squander it at the temple. I don’t believe in dumping money into religious causes.”

The boy gave her another look of befuddlement, yet his hand remained outstretched. Connie reached into the leather bag that jangled from her belt.

Rahl rode up to them. “What is your problem, child?”

“My mother is sick with a fever. I need money to take her to the temple.”

Connie withdrew a shiny iridium coin amid the copper-colored coins from her purse to hand to the boy. When Rahl saw what she was going to do, he spoke up.

“Alyndia! Don’t—!”

But before he could say anything more, the boy jumped up and snatched the coin from her fingers. He looked down at the shiny and bright coin in the palm of his dirty hand. His eyes were wide with disbelief. Then he quickly bowed several times to her.

“Thank you, lady! Thank you, lady! Thank you, lady!”

Each time he bowed, he took another step backward. Then he ran away from them, disappearing into the crowd. Rahl shook his head, turned his hanyak around, and rode forward to join Jalban. The two waited for her a hundred paces up the street. Jalban glared at her as she approached but said nothing. Connie thought he looked disgusted with her.

The three continued onward. Neither of Connie’s companions said anything to her as they passed through the crowd. Eventually, both the crowd and the buildings thinned. After twenty minutes or so, the unimproved dirt road had become only a rutted path. Now there were more trees, of different varieties, none of which she recognized. She only knew they looked similar to pine. The woods were not especially dense, and she caught glimpses of an occasional hut or cottage in the trees some distance from the road. Surrounding some of these cottages were fenced-in areas containing peculiar-looking farm animals. Some of these creatures clucked, brayed strangely, or made other odd beastly sounds as they passed.

Now the sun was high on the horizon, and it became hot, but they were entering a more heavily wooded area, and the signs of habitation grew slight. Connie’s mind turned to the boy she’d encountered, with his green eyes and his plea for his mother. He was not unlike the street urchins she encountered during a six-month spy assignment in northern India she accepted early in her career. Posing as a British tourist, her task was to gather information on India’s nascent nuclear capabilities.

She rode up to Rahl, feeling satisfied with herself for being able to help the child. She decided to gloat a bit.

“I hope that child makes good use of that money I gave him. Can you believe he wanted to give it to a temple?”

“He may, he may not. You never know what he will use it for.”

Connie detected some dismay towards her in his tone. She stopped riding. “Hold on a minute, Rahl. Do you have a problem with someone helping out the poor?”

Rahl stopped next to him. “No, I don’t,” he replied. “It’s just what you gave him.”

“What do you mean?”

“What do I mean, you ask?”

“You think I didn’t give him enough?”

Rahl let out a guffaw and started riding again. Connie quickly caught up with him.

“Tell me what you mean.”

“Isn’t that obvious to you? You gave him a rezni piece.”

“So?” Connie didn’t follow what Rahl meant. She did not like his attitude. She wanted to kick him off his hanyak.

“Don’t you know the value of money? A rezni is worth a month’s wages for the average freeman.”

“It is?” Connie asked, feeling suddenly foolish at what she had done. She felt certain that the other grimy, copper colored coins in her purse were not worth nearly as much as the Rezni. She wondered how many more of those she had.

“Yes, and sure, you have more of those, and I’m assuming you have all the confidence that the boy will make good use of the money.”

Connie shook her head. She reached for her purse. He probably doesn’t even have a mother that he knows, she thought.

Liam chimed in. “Maybe he has a father who sends him out for drinking money, and then flogs him when he doesn’t bring back enough at the end of the day.”

“Enough from you two already. I feel bad enough without you two adding to it.” Connie said, vexed, as she sorted through and counted the coins in her purse. There were no more Reznis. “How far away is this place we’re going to?” she asked weakly, spilling the coins back into her purse.

“We should be there by tomorrow afternoon.” Rahl answered.

“Now what is it we’re supposed to be doing?”

Jalban sighed. “Alyndia, since you awoke this morning, you have been acting strangely. Why do you ask such foolish questions?”

“Then refresh my memory, Uncle Jalban,” Connie said in the bitchiest tone she could coax from her newly slight voice. Jalban shook his head and rode ahead of her.

Rahl replied for him. “We are going to the Castle Maray to assist in the repair of the Calphous Wall.”

Connie winced. “You mean we’re going all this way to fix somebody’s wall?”

Rahl stared at her with ill-concealed dismay. “Haven’t you heard of the Calphous Wall, the barrier to the Dark Realms?” he asked her as if the question were the most obvious.

“Nope.”

“Then I suppose you haven’t heard of the earth tremor that destroyed part of it.”

“Nope.”

“Didn’t you say you were from Roggentine?”

“I didn’t say I was from there.”

“Then what did you say?”

“Look, Rahl,” Connie was going to say, and then she eyed Jalban ahead of them. She lowered her voice. “Look, Rahl,” she began again, “I don’t know if you’re in on this, but I’m going to take a chance on you. Listen to me very carefully. My name is not Alyndia the Sorceress. My name is Connie Bain. I’m a citizen of the United States. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I think I’ve been drugged and kidnapped. I woke up this morning and found myself in this strange country. It all happened when I put on this bracelet.”

Rahl ran his fingers through his beard. “Which bracelet are you talking about?”

“Well, it was given to me by my partner, Agent William MacGregor. You see, we were investigating the disappearance of controlled substances from a university. We traced it to this professor who worked at the university. His son has ties to a terrorist group in the Middle East that I cannot name.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s classified. Anyway, this professor, a crackpot, really, claimed he had contacted a sorceress named Alyndia through some interdimensional portal. He also said the people in her world breathed chlorine gas and had this special covenant with God, among other things. Then the professor said that if we put the bracelet on the wrist of his wife, who lay comatose at the hospital, her body would become inhabited with the spirit of this sorceress who was waiting on the astral plane.”

“Did you put the bracelet on her?”

Connie rubbed the nape of her neck. “Not really. I didn’t get the chance. I think someone followed me to the hospital. They sneaked up on me and struck me over the head before I could. I woke up later with a massive headache and looking like I do now.”

“But Jalban thinks you’re Alyndia. Though I don’t know him, he seems honest enough.”

“He might be in on it, though. For all I know, he masterminded this whole thing. Do you understand the predicament I’m in? I can’t trust anyone.”

“But who would want to kidnap you? And why?”

Connie sighed. “I don’t know who. I’m still trying to figure that out. Why? I can think of a hundred reasons why someone would want to kidnap me. I’ve worked on assignments all over the world. I do have knowledge that could be useful to some foreign power, I suppose…” Her voice trailed off. “But to tell you the truth, I haven’t a clue who brought me here or for what ulterior purpose.”

“So, if you’re not a sorceress, what are you?”

Connie looked around to make sure Jalban wasn’t within earshot. “I’m a spook,” she stated in a hushed tone.

“You say you’re a ghost,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone.

“No. I work for the CIA. I’m with the Homeland Security Department.”

“Homeland—what?”

“I do covert investigations of suspected terrorists.”

“Oh. So you scry? That’s your purpose? To spy on people?” He scrutinized her from head to toe, obviously making an attempt to see the connection.

“You make it sound bad, but really it isn’t. My job is to save lives, not keep tabs on innocent people.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. She did not like the look he was giving her.

Connie cleared her throat. “Before I go any further, Rahl, I want to clarify something for you. I don’t care what you’ve heard about our organization; we would never take a human life unless our own was in jeopardy or if it jeopardized the security of the United States or its citizens.”

“I’ve never heard of the United States.”

“It’s only the most powerful empire on the planet.”

“I thought Cerinavia was.”

“Hell, I’ve never even heard of Cerinavia until now, and I aced World Geography in college. You need to come to reality, Rahl. It’s a big world out there, and nobody gives a damn about this cheap-ass, third-world, backwater country. What’s the government like here? Let me guess. Is it Marxist? Is it fascist? Is it a two-bit Class B dictatorship? Or is it just plain old anarchy? The United States pisses all over this petty country.”

Rahl stared at Connie with a sudden expression of wariness.

“What’s wrong?”

“To speak from my heart, I have to admit I am rather stunned.”

“Why, because you realized I’d been kidnapped?”

Rahl shook his head. “I’ve just never before heard a lady sorceress speak with such a foul tongue.”

“I told you, Rahl, I’m not a sorceress.”

“You are not a lady, either,” he said, with obvious disdain for her.

“No, I’m not a lady. And don’t get all patriarchal with me. I’ll have you know that even though I don’t consider myself a proper feminist, I do have strong feminist leanings.”

With those words, Rahl dug his heels into the sides of the hanyak and galloped ahead to join Jalban, leaving her along with the pack hanyak.

“Ignorant bastard,” Connie muttered.

Thirty minutes later, they left the roadside to break for lunch. They sat on some logs they spotted in a clearing just off the roadside. The spot had evidently been used by other travelers recently, as the smoldering remains of a campfire sat within a small ring of stones positioned squarely between the fallen trees.

Rahl and Jalban sat together and spoke in hushed tones, while Connie sat by herself on a log opposite them. Connie forced herself to eat portions of the rations in her pack, though more than a few of them looked unappetizing. She had never seen vegetables such as the ones she ate, especially the one that looked like a small, blue potato but tasted like an apple. They washed everything down with a naturally sweet aceralla-leaf tea Jalban had prepared earlier in the trip. She overheard Jalban explain to Rahl that the bark of the aceralla tree was so poisonous that a mere sliver of its bark inserted beneath the skin was enough to cause the death of a young child. It seemed Jalban knew an awful lot about strangely named herbs. Though she had started to feel weary from the trip, the tea perked her up and gave her energy, not unlike a caffeine rush. With Jalban and Rahl, the tea had the opposite effect. Both of them, feeling weary, draped their blankets over the trees and settled in for a short nap.

While the two men slept, Connie wandered the surrounding forest, taking in the pastoral setting. Birds sang melodiously in the towering pine-like trees that towered above them. Dried nettles crunched beneath her feet with every step. She caught the sweet scent of vanilla emanating from somewhere. She traced the scent to the bark of one of the trees. She put her nose up against the bark and inhaled deeply to savor its fragrance. Suddenly, she heard something fall to the ground behind her with a loud thump. She quickly turned around, startled. A large, conical acorn the size of a baseball had fallen from the tree. Most unusual of all, it was blue with metallic green swirls. She picked it up and gasped, for it was the largest and most unusual acorn she had ever seen. She looked up to see a green squirrel watching her enviously from a branch high above. She returned her attention to the acorn. It was heavy too, and it had an unopened, three-sided slit on the bottom. It looked like a psychedelic moon capsule. Then she noticed there were dozens of acorns on the ground all around her. Most of them were damaged and split open by the squirrels. She tossed the acorn between her hands, gauging its weight and solidity.

“Finders keepers,” she called out to the squirrel as she left the tree, taking the acorn with her.

Back at the camp, Rahl and Jalban snored loudly. Connie went to put the acorn in her pack. Then she had the unmistakable feeling that she was being watched. She looked toward the camp. Rahl and Jalban were sleeping soundly. She looked around, scanning the woods for any sign of movement. She saw none. She looked up into the trees. There’s nothing there either. She closed her eyes and listened. All was silent except for the swishing of the breeze through the pines and the chirping of birds. She looked around one more time, but now the feeling of being watched subsided.

She returned her attention to the saddlebags. She untied a few of the leather cords from the packs to find an empty place to store the acorn. Going through the packs, she found several other items, including a cache of leather-bound books tied shut with what appeared to be four colors of silk ribbon: red, blue, brown, and white. Along with these, we found two pouches. One contained small, square cubes of a reddish wood that looked like they could have been unfinished Vegas-sized dice. In the other pouch, she found some oddly-cut crystals of the same color and some clear ones too. She found a preponderance of the red crystals and only two cool blue crystals. Crazily, the red crystals were exceptionally warm to the touch compared to the ambient temperature of the air, and the blue crystals were cold.

She untied the white ribbon that sealed the cover of one of the books and opened it to a random page. Without the slightest effort, her mind instantly decoded this as part of a magic spell. This spell was one that used wind to push something. She turned another page. This was a spell that amplified sound. Now she was opening yet another book, this one with a brown ribbon. This spell, several pages long, moved soil. She didn’t understand how it was all supposed to work. The instructions for the spells contained few incantations, but more methods for mental channeling of energy and the focusing of the mental energy into the shape of a rune. It seemed to Connie that it would take the discipline of a monk to perform the mental feats detailed within the pages of the books.

She took all the books out of the pack and laid them out on a fallen log. She quickly correlated the colors of the silk ribbons to the types of spells. There were nineteen spells in all, distributed among seven books, and they were sharply demarcated into four “elemental states” of Solid, Gas, Liquid, and Flame. All the books were handwritten in some sort of crazy, multicolored ink. The corners of some pages were adorned with ornate, fanciful drawings of ivy and flowers. It was evident that someone had expended a great deal of time and energy on writing the books. Such a wasted effort for something so beautiful. She shook her head and stuffed the books haphazardly back into the pack. Did Jalban and Rahl really believe these spells would actually work, and that she, mistakenly believed to be Alyndia the Sorceress, could cast them? This character, Alyndia, was bamboozling somebody, and it troubled her that she might have to pay the price for Alyndia’s deception.

Just as the books were put away, she saw Rahl get to his feet. He yawned lackadaisically then surveyed the sky. Moments later, he quickly awoke Jalban. They had overslept, and now they would not make it to the village of Zeranon before nightfall unless they hurried.

Once on the road again, Jalban and Rahl took turns telling jokes. Although the two of them had an uproarious time, she got none of the jokes. It occurred to her that the two men might be mocking her, so she slipped behind them and rode a good distance behind them, out of earshot. The longer they rode, the denser the forest became, and now the pine trees were intermixed with a deciduous tree that looked like it might be a sycamore, only with black leaves instead of green.

After they had been traveling for an hour or so, Connie was beginning to feel a bit saddle sore. Though she had ridden hanyaks most of her life and kept herself in excellent shape, somehow her body was not accustomed to the feeling of being in a saddle once again. This baffled her. Rahl and Jalban did not seem fazed at all by the ride, and they rode onward, chatting among themselves and telling nonsensical jokes without punch lines. Connie was just about to ride ahead to ask them to stop for a break when she felt an internal tug toward the forest. The sensation was strangely like that which she felt at the marketplace earlier in the day, when the street vendor sold the peculiar little jugs.

Connie stopped the hanyak and stood still, trying to pinpoint the source of the sensation. The call to her senses emanated from a clump of bushes about a dozen paces from the roadside. She dismounted the hanyak and approached the bushes. The closer she got to the bushes, the stronger the feeling of attraction. The bush now seemed to draw her like a magnet. She ambled to the bush in her robe, nearly stumbling in the underbrush. Now she was in the bush. She thought for a moment about going back to the roadside to tell the others where she was, but the attraction was too great, and it mesmerized her. She stared at the bush for a minute or so, then she moved some branches aside to see what might be concealed. Just then, she heard a twig snap behind her. She quickly spun around to see Jalban standing there. Her attention had been so entirely focused on the bush that she had not even noticed his approach. In his hand, he held one of the cubes of wood from her pack.

“I thought you might need this,” he said, holding out the cube to her.

“What for?” she asked, not taking the cube.

“Is it not wood?” he asked. “Or shall I retrieve a crystal?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Connie said.

Jalban gave Connie a momentary perplexed look, then his expression quickly turned to that of vexation. “Alyndia, your charade has become tiresome. Extract the node, if that’s what it is, and let’s go. If we don’t hurry, we will not make it to Zeranon before dark.” He proffered the wooden block to Connie again. “Here, take it.”

Connie took the wooden cube from Jalban and turned to the bush. “What do I do?”

“What do you mean, “What do I do?” By the boot of the gods—get the damned node and put it in the cell!” he shouted.

“How?”

“You’re the sorceress, and you’re asking me how to extract the node? You very well know I am an herbalist and have not been trained in extracting nodes.”

“Just give me a hint, then. How do I extract the node?”

“How do I…” Jalban’s voice trailed off.

Jalban let out a sigh of disgust. Connie felt him glaring at her back. She was ready to swing around and give him a quick kick to the groin for his indignant manner toward her. Finally, he spoke again with a calmer voice but with an overtone of ill-concealed annoyance.

“You have to concentrate. You have to will the node into your cell.”

“What cell?”

“The one in your hand.”

“This?” she asked. She examined the wood cube in her hand, looking for an opening of some sort. It didn’t appear to have any obvious openings; it appeared to be solid.

“Yes. Now use your willpower to move the node into the cell.”

Connie kneeled in front of the source of the attraction. She moved the branches aside with her hand and looked into the bush. She saw nothing but a dense net of wiry branches attached to a thick trunk. Her attraction was strongest at the bush’s trunk, but she saw nothing that resembled the node described by Jalban.

“I don’t see anything. Where is the node?” she asked, thinking it might be a specific part of the bush.

“Where do you sense it is?”

“The trunk, I think,” Connie said, unsure.

“That’s where it is. Will it out.”

“How?”

“What do you mean, ‘how?’” Jalban asked, his voice tense again.

“Have patience with me, Jalban. I’ve never done this before. Now, how do I will it out?”

“By the gods…” his voice trailed off, followed by some barely-annunciated curses. “Picture the node in the trunk, then move it into the cell.”

As crazy as it sounded to her, she decided to take Jalban’s word for it. She held the cube up to the trunk, and then she proceeded to concentrate on the so-called “node” in the trunk, as Jalban said. Suddenly, the wood cube in her fingers began to glow translucently with brownish-green light, then the light faded away, the cube absorbing the glow like a sponge. She moved the cube away from the trunk and examined it. Physically, the cube was unchanged, only now her strange, subconscious fascination had transferred from the bush to something within the cube.

“Let us go now,” Jalban said.

Connie got to her feet and followed Jalban back to the road, where Rahl waited on his hanyak. Jalban said nothing to either of them as he climbed back into the saddle of his hanyak. Connie took one last look at the wood cube before slipping it into a hidden pocket at the breast level of her robe. She was just about to get back on her hanyak when Rahl dismounted. He quickly withdrew a shiny sword from the scabbard attached to his waist. Startled by the appearance of the sword, Connie was about to bolt when she realized that Rahl was staring down the tree-shaded road they had just traveled.

“What it is, Rahl?” Connie asked.

“Hush,” he said to her in a hoarse whisper. “We’re being followed.”