the Elsewhere Riddle is complete
I just finished a rough draft of the fourth and final book of a series I’ve been chipping away at for a period of years. Do I feel amazing? Hell no, of course not. I hate finishing a book, I’ll spend days or weeks wandering around listlessly, opening every other project I’m working on only to close the document after twenty minutes after deleting a single comma.
But enough of that maudlin crap, what’s this about a story?
a look inside The Nicodemus Path
I could describe the world, the action, the characters. Probably I will. Save that for another day, though; today, I want to send you straight in, so you can get a glimpse firsthand.
an exclusive excerpt from book one of The Elsewhere Riddle
The morning after the funeral, Danae rose early. Her father was sleeping off a drunk, but her mother was out in the kitchen washing a load of dishes that were already clean, gone away behind her eyes. She was glad both of them were in a bad way; had they taken note of her, they might have forbidden her to go out.
Outside, she discovered it was still raining. Not as hard as yesterday, but the wind had picked up, dashing a cold mist into her face. She bent her head as she stepped off the stoop, making her way through a town fashioned from the repurposed stone of finer buildings. The majority of it was grey and plain, but some homes were particolored and some displayed random fragments of ornamentation. If you looked for it, you could find places where the stone had been inscribed, the words hacked away so only ghostly scratches remained.
When they were children, she and Matros used to have treasure hunts, scouting after every piece of carving and broken text, pretending to find clues therein to great mysteries hidden in ages past. Then she grew up and realized the message from ages past was only hidden inasmuch as it had been writ too large for her to see. All one need do to divine the secret was take a few steps back and look again.
She didn’t have far to go, only about a mile. Rather than make directly for her destination, she walked east a few blocks between the thatched stone houses. Soon she found what she sought: a paved road. The vein connecting Thesra to the Nicodemus Path on the far side of the human settlement. She had no idea why the elves hadn’t put the thing within the walls of their own town, but it did mean there was one place she could walk free of the mud.
Once there, she turned north and made her way toward Thesra. The town was concealed by low-hanging clouds, but it had stood sentinel atop its hill overlooking her own for as long as she had lived and for more than two hundred years before that. The buildings were graceful, slender, pale grey stone with steeply-tiled celadon roofs. It was her understanding that Thesra was an outpost, on the order of a necessary exile for its residents. A border-fort on a front of occupation that reached everywhere and had no boundaries.
The town was fortified, a keep at its center, a bastion wall around the base of its modest hill. The white-stone wall was as tall as several men standing on each other’s shoulders, the gate so broad three chariots could be driven through abreast, the doors made of oak and reinforced with bands of dark metal. It was strange to look upon that wall and imagine a world in which it had felt necessary. She made no attempt to enter but approached a small building skulking like a beggar beside the gate.
She presented herself to the clerk and asked to speak to the Warden, then sat down to wait, basket at her feet. After a while, the damp cold began to bother her, and she pulled her hands within her cloak. She waited for at least an hour, watching other, more favored petitioners pass through the door in the rear of the waiting room. Gusting winds lashed rain against the window and hissed across the pond-sized puddles that had formed on the street outside. Drafts leaked around every crack and join in the walls. With each gust, she shivered and tried to nestle deeper into her cloak. Finally, the clerk indicated that she should come.
The room beyond the door was no larger than the pitiful anteroom, although here, a fire blazed in a hearth on the inner wall. Someone had made a better effort to fill the chinks in the masonry, and the noise of the wind died almost to nothing. A large rug was spread across the center of the floor, and Danae was careful not to tread on it.
There were two people seated behind desks within. Only one of them acknowledged her, while the other remained bent over his paperwork. Danae looked at him, taking in the long, tapered ears thrusting through his hair, the faint, silvery glow that seemed to hang about him like chaff dust catching the sun after a winnowing. Then she turned her attention fully on the other human.
“Warden Spiro, sir,” she began, keeping her gaze locked on his shoulder. If she looked directly into his eyes, how could he fail to recognize the hatred in hers? “I seek a permit to sell my wares in the Thesra market.”
“You think that wise?” the Warden asked skeptically.
“Why not?” she replied as innocently as she could manage, striving to sound puzzled by the question. “Thesra is said to be a very safe place.” He wasn’t about to dispute the claim before the room’s other occupant, and it was doubtless true.
Spiro glared at her before gesturing brusquely to the basket hanging at her elbow. “You think you can make enough of a profit to cover the fees for the gate pass and the market pass? Let me see what you have.”
Danae pulled the waxed leather cover off her basket and began removing its contents, which she lined up on the edge of his desk.
“Oh, marvelous! May I?” She almost leapt from her skin at the voice behind her. She hadn’t heard the elf rise from his seat, but there he was. When she nodded, he picked up the basket at the far end of the row with his long-fingered, gracile hands. Even in the poor light of the rain-shrouded room, the feathers sewn around the basket’s mouth shimmered with iridescence.
“It’s for decoration only or some particular use?” His lisping accent made her language new, somehow glamorous. He pulled his eyes from the basket to stare down a long, straight nose at her.
“To whatever use its admirer might put it, my lord.” She made a shadow of a curtsy. “They’re not fit for liquids or anything, um, like spices or food—”
“Materials of an organic nature?” Not waiting to find out whether that was indeed what she meant, he set the small basket back on the desk. Casting a glance at Spiro, he said, “These will sell very well,” before turning back to his own work as if the matter were settled.
And because of his intervention, it was. Danae wanted to laugh. The Warden would have wanted to withhold the pass because Cleatus didn’t like people leaving the human settlement where they were under his eye, but he could hardly say so. She couldn’t remember ever being grateful to an elf for anything, but Spiro had no choice but to write out the pass for her while she returned her works to the safety of the larger basket.
She received a small but very official-looking rectangle of paper complete with the Council Seal pressed in blue wax at the bottom. Then he had to explain the rules for entering the town, when she could enter and for how many days the pass lasted, when she must leave. She paid for it and received a written receipt. Her face felt wooden from the effort of holding it serene.
At long last, the ordeal was ended, but she had passed through only half the bureaucracy. Spiro sent her to the other desk, where the elf would grant her a market pass. The desks faced each other across the room, and she could feel the Warden’s dead grey eyes boring into her back even when she no longer had to face them. The elf also had words to offer along with his pass, this time a small disk of engraved copper hanging from a silken ribbon of imperial green. She listened carefully, particularly to his strictures about water: humans weren’t permitted to touch the purewater fountains, but there remained ordinary wells sufficiently plebian her kind might drink from them.
When she made to pass him the fee for a week’s space in the market, he made a small gesture with those graceful hands, waving it away. Danae felt anger blaze, such that she grew warm for the first time since she quit the house that morning. She wasn’t going to make a scene, but she wasn’t about to be patronized by some imperial flunky, either. Looking directly into his eyes, she leaned forward and set the coin very deliberately before him. It made a satisfying click.
With a brief curtsy and a hastily-murmured word of thanks, she fled. She was cursing herself as she went. Had she offended him, he might have revoked the market pass. She would have had no excuse to set foot in Thesra then, and Spiro would have been all too happy to take back her gate pass, too.
On the way home, she held the basket protectively within the folds of her cloak. She had to let the wind take her hood and accept a wet head; every time she pulled it forward, the next gust blew it back off. At least she could hurry while on the road between the gate and the Nicodemus Path. Once she turned into the winding muddy paths slinking between the buildings of the human town, she had to slow to a crawl, making certain of each step.
There had been a city here once. She didn’t know much about it, only that it had spread about the hill on which Thesra now stood, and a king had had a castle there that looked down on a place with no elves. That was before the war, though. Before they raised their hands to their neighbors and learned what it truly meant that humans had not been made with magic in them.
Thesra had been an isolated place and still was for the humans who lived here. It hadn’t been at the center of the fighting, not like those settlements that lay near the great elven cities, Kash Edil, Haikuron, and the jewel of the empire, Ivere. The elves had come for them eventually, though. They had killed the king and torn down his castle and made the hill on which it stood a town for their own so they could watch the humans who lived here.
She stopped at the back door, which lay closer to the Thesra gate, in order to knock the mud off her shoes. She did it with a bitter twist to her lips, thinking that, once, there were paved streets here, fine buildings, even gardens growing something other than food. It hadn’t been their new overlords who tore the city down: they did that themselves. They couldn’t abide their loss and especially not its implications, so they ran riot, destroying their own culture, casting down their temples to their gods, burning their very history to ash.
Remaking their towns of mud and broken masonry. Rendering themselves, not only subjects, but genuinely subjugated. Denied victory, embracing defeat. Brought to accept that magic couldn’t be stolen, unwilling to possess civilization at all.
Making what it meant to be human: not an elf.
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