Monarchy: Falling Through

"Not again."

The place was dark (that was nothing new) and damp, and smelled of aging trees. The breeze was cold and got under Tern's cloak, as if winter was setting in and he needed nothing of winter. There were enough problems brewing without winter sticking her hand in and mucking about. Fortunately, there was someone nearby, waiting for… well, probably someone else, but he was here now and whoever she was waiting for could just wait.

"You. Where am I?" Tern asked her sharply. The women, who couldn't have been more than four years older than him, looked surprised to find him there. Visitors apparently weren't common in the area.

"Where did you come from?" she asked, then. Then, as if the thought occurred to her: "You're not one of the companions, are you?"

"What? What nonsense, we are hardly old enough to be a companion for you."

"I didn't mean like that! I'd just—I'd just asked him for—"

"Who?"

"A—" she stoppered her own sentence. "What?"

"The request you presented. To whom did you present it? Please answer succinctly, this whole conversation is wasting a lamentable amount of our time."

"His Majesty, King Fredrick."

Finally, somewhere with a royal system. "And he resides near here?"

"No, the castle isn't for several days' journey, that way." She pointed, and Tern banked the direction in his memory for future reference. She continued to stare at him, as if she had never seen a prince outside of a castle. She probably hadn't, though she carried herself with too much importance for a peasant.

She spoke with too much confidence as well:  "Where did you come from?"

"This is another of those cursed dimensional slips. We keep discovering them, so frequently we should simply develop a map – if we could stop finding them long enough to grab some paper!" He snapped this last statement at the sky because honestly, this was the most ridiculous inconvenience and it kept happening. This time, he hadn't even been wandering; he had been crossing between lesson rooms, with Murk only a few feet ahead of him, and he had been forcibly yanked from the hallway and dumped here, with the wind pulling and curling under his cloak. There was no time to prepare. It was sheer luck that it had been drafty in the castle that day; he wouldn't have even had the cloak otherwise. Murk was probably tearing the place apart looking for him.

"Where do you reside?" he asked the woman.

"There." She pointed again (this woman liked pointing), and he followed her finger to a large wooden building, shrouded in darkness. It occurred to him now that her behavior was odd – a woman should not be out wandering in the pitch black of night, not with just a lantern at her disposal.

"You live alone."

"Yes—well, no. I have companions. You are welcome to stay there, if you are lost, but we will be leaving soon."

"It's acceptable to us to use your abode."

At least the building would be warmer than this chilled winter air. Another benefit: the building had smoke coming out of the stone chimney – the companions kept a fire going. Of course, a civilization as backwards as this couldn't be expected to know how to manage air flow and heating; it had taken Blackthistle technicians years and many frozen nights to discover that. Even now, the system in the castle still suffered breakdowns on occasion and cold air would sweep airily through the castle halls.

The woman led him to the door and stopped as soon as she had swung it open, careful not to cross the threshold. Just inside was a living room only a little ways from the entryway, with several rich couches and a burning fireplace.  

"Enter," she said. "I will join you when morning has come." She paused, thinking hard for a moment, as if for something almost lost to memory. Then, a breakthrough:

"Creon!" she called into the room. A farmhand stuck his head out of the adjacent hallway.

"Jackie!"

"Night," she corrected and Tern heard the faint irritation in her voice, recognized it from his own tone when people mistook him for Othello, or deemed it their right to remove his title or shorten his name. "This is a boy who was in the woods. We're keeping him until morning."

"Er." Creon kept the winning smile as he glanced at Tern, then back at Night. He was lying about something to the girl, his grin made it obvious, but it had nothing to do with Tern. "But we're leaving tomorrow night. Will he be gone by then?"

Tern answered this, not trusting the girl to give an accurate response. "Most definitely. There are people who will be coming for us."

He was learning, from these many experiences, how to handle the shift in dimensions. Do not be overly commanding; do not attempt to explain the circumstance. Do not expect anything other than a bare minimum of hospitality, but do complain until it is received. So far, this adventure had been smooth – a woman, a fireplace, the possibility of a bed (however little he expected to sleep), and now this situation with the liar. Perhaps he would not play a significant role.

"Excellent," Creon said. "Be with you in a moment. Night, I'd like it if you stayed in the area for tonight. Just because of the wolves, and Cai is worried they might try something because of… last night."

That said, he ducked back out of the hallway. The woman lingered another moment, clearly pretending to honor his words, then wandered off into the deep woods again, taking the lantern with her. Tern moved farther into the room, thinking dark thoughts about the transient anomalies he kept encountering.

This was certainly one of the dimensions further down the tube that funneled through Iriritamago, judging by the darkness, the stagnancy of technology—even  the little kingdom of Landria had had superior human resources at the entrance point. Here, the anomaly hadn't even led to a castle. Ignoring the questions stirring about safety and his chances of getting back, Tern moved to one of the windows to look at the sky.

A place as far down the tunnel as this… it brought to mind some frightening possibilities of things that might work. There were some unfortunate, unsophisticated places where they still blamed immolations on dragons, glimpsed phoenixes on a regular basis, and the creatures weren't man-made monsters, they were original. In those places, things worked that shouldn't. And people accepted them.

The fire was sputtering out, so he walked into the next room to tell the liar to stock it with wood. The man was hunched over an uncooperative bundle of cloth, trying to tie it all into one roll.

"Your fire is out," Tern said.

"Already? I just stoked it. Fine, I'll fix it, just tie a knot in this for me while I do."

Tern analyzed the bundle without taking the ties. "It is a poor job and the tent will not hold together. Is your journey several steps long?"

"No, it's across the entire—fine." The man let go the ties and the package exploded open. "Wood's next to the fireplace. Fix the fire yourself."

"It is not our fire to nurse!"

"Creon! Aren't you done yet?" Another man was coming down the staircase and the liar crouched in front of the tent, hiding the poorly-tied package from view.

"Mostly. His Highness here wants us to light the fire though. Apparently, his hands are broken—"

"How did you know that?!" Tern demanded.

The liar stared at him. "You just told—"

"Never mind. We should not stay here long." Magic was tricky; these people might have it running from their minds to his, prying to see what his origin was and his intentions. This didn't look to be the case, with the liar desperately trying to roll the tent into a state fit for travelling, but looks were frequently deceptive. The other man could be a "magician" and Tern kept him in view as the man went into the front room. There was a grating-crackle-pop of new wood on the fire and warmth crept out of the living room, renewed.

The man-who-could-be-magician came back out, brushed the liar aside and tied up the tent in a moment as the liar offered excuses about this being a new type of tent, the numbness of his fingers from the cold, his worry about Night being out there alone. Tern wandered into the main room, noting that the woman was still missing. Strange that she would call these men her companions when they accompanied her so little. Then, something else caught his attention.

At first, he believed it was just a trick of the fire– fires were notoriously tricky—but its base was definitely swirling in a different direction than the fire's flow. The midnight smell of an anomaly hovered in the room, above the combustion and heat: a cold high note.

"Peasant!" he snapped. Both of the men responded with scowls and attention.

"What do you want now?" the liar asked. The other said nothing, stepped into the doorway to watch Tern. There was no interest in his eyes, only derision, and Tern paused. He had intended to tell them, to keep them from stopping him, but with that gaze, he was sure that they wouldn't believe him.

If they didn't know now, they should continue not to know who he was or why he was going to be stepping into the fire in a minute.  They might insist on accompanying him, or stopping him, or questioning who he was and what he was doing. That would all take time they did not deserve.

"We heard wolves, and wondered if you should not be accompanying your mistress," he said smoothly.

The man in the door looked over at the liar, invisible.

"I told her to stay around here," the liar said nervously.

"She was not there when we glanced out the door," Tern said. The liar got up and came into view, motioning the other to follow.

"Then we'd better get her. I think you should stay here, highness."

"We would dream of doing nothing else. Your mistress is not our concern."

This made the liar hesitate, sensing the lie in this statement. If he did not care, why would he warn them? But the other man was already at the door and the liar did not want to be shown up. He trailed after, keeping an eye on Tern as if he couldn't figure out the prince's agenda. Which, of course, was true. Tern waited until the other man had closed the door and promptly stepped into the fire.

It was very fortunate that they were gone. He would have had to execute them because he was painfully aware of how absolutely ridiculous he looked trying to put out the fire on his pant leg.

"Infernal combustion, we have no time for this!" he shouted at the fire.

And something fell over upstairs.

Tern froze. It could have been nothing he knocked over; this was a wooden dwelling, yes, but not a tremulous one. It had been some spell of time since any of the occupants were upstairs. He stepped away from the fire, straining to hear further sounds. He was not disappointed.

The stairs began to creak a moment later, many times, quick little steps in a rush. He stepped backwards hurriedly, into the shadow of the mantle and hidden by the dark. He was small enough (for once, a blessing) to conceal himself without worrying about height or shadows.

Another man entered. For a moment, Tern thought he recognized the man – his languid stance and detached gaze reminded him of nothing more than one of his cousin's hired assassins, a man named Klauj. But no, this was a different man: Klauj would never have prowled carefully as this man did, noting each corner of the room as he approached the fire. The man had wrapped cloth around his hand and reached out to take one of the unburned pieces of wood.

Once he had it in hand, he moved reverently back into the room and touched the torch to the sofa. Then, to one of the paintings. Then, the floor, the doorframe. He moved on through the door and Tern could hear him progressing. The fires took only moments to catch – there was plenty of fabric in this room, and Tern realized suddenly that this was really happening. It was not some surreal dream: some madman had just set this place on fire.

That was why they were in such a hurry to leave – an intruder with arsonistic tendencies would certainly do it! He glanced at the fire again, unwilling to leave it for an equally inflamed room. The swirling mass in the fire was definitely an anomaly and the only thing around here that held the possibility of home.

Tern stepped out of the shadows of the mantelpiece and knelt to put a hand in the blackness of the anomaly. Anything more than the lightest touch burned – he gasped and yanked his hand away involuntarily. Repeating to himself that he knew better, he knew better!, he grabbed a pillow from the couch and threw it over the fire. The flames choked on it, struggling to consume the thick fabric as he crouched half in the fire, trying to kneel in the anomaly and keep an eye on the door. Things would all be much easier, he thought bitterly, if he had eyes in the back of his head.

The room was very dark with the fire smothered; all the same, he could see the intruder in the little light from the burning room and the remnant glow of the fire. Tern's activity had brought him back, of course, and though Tern could feel the flames licking at his shoes –at anything they could get—he dared not move. Breathing had become a silly idea anyway, with the room filling up with smoke.

The anomaly beneath him finally turned cold, activating, as the intruder started forward. The torch for arson was still lazily held in one hand, as if the burning of this place meant little, and Tern forced himself not to move. The flames had found his pant leg, seconds and they would find his leg.

Before that happened, everything dropped.

That included the fire. When he hit the ground, he had to roll away to avoid the shower of burning logs and flame. The action took him off some kind of table, hitting the ground hard, and his next action was to beat at his leg, trying to put out the flames. It was several seconds before someone threw a bucket of water over him. Instead of shouting accusations, he sat up and looked around.

It was a conference room. The intruder hadn't followed and the entire group of Blackthistle technicians was looking down at him, some craning to see him over the conference table (which he had just rolled off), others pushing back their seats to get a better look. One was holding an empty bucket, grinning sheepishly when Tern looked at him.

"You'd be surprised how often that happens," he said, replacing the bucket against the wall. Tern didn't recognize him.

"We… where is this?"

"Guidesher," said Walter, the unflappable leader of the technicians a single familiar face in the mass of curious expressions. "You have had trouble with an anomaly again?"

"We have had no trouble, they seem to like us. Inordinately so." Tern tried to brush himself off, only to find his hands and clothing coated with soot. He straightened, letting no hint of embarrassment show. Guidesher. Of all the locations, he had to return to the place no one was permitted to go besides Blackthistle technicians themselves. Still, he was royalty and they were in voluntary fealty to his father. "There is a stable anomaly to the castle in this place. We will use that to return. Now."

"Of course. I'll take him," Walter said to the few technicians who were already getting up. "Adjourn, for now, under Special Circumstance #34. And replace the water bucket."

Tern followed the head of the technicians down the halls of the unfamiliar headquarters. Very few outside the technicians ever came here or knew where it was. Since the great massacre, back in the Mad King's time, the technicians had been very careful to keep their base of operations a secret. Even the kings they assisted did not know its location. Even so, Walter accused him of nothing.

The walls of the place were lined with ancestors and blueprints, so intermingled it was hard to know which portrait went with which invention.

"If I may ask, where did you go this time?" Walter asked politely as they paused. He had to unlock a thick double door at the end of the hall, the lock a strange device with multiple wheels that spun counter to one another. To lock in a number, Walter had to get the timing just right, as well as the number.

"A run-down dwelling in the woods. Someone set fire to it, the occupants had gone out… we suspect it was a magic place, such was the dilapidation of the technology."

"That far down the line, hm." Walter fiddled with the lock. "If you're not careful, you'll end up in Earth one of these days. It's the only place you haven't hit so far."

"Which… where is that?"

"Above us."

"Is it safe?" Tern asked. Better to know than not know, at this rate.

Walter succeeded in getting the door unlocked and swung it open to a very small room with a fixed anomaly swirling in the floor. He shrugged as Tern stepped inside.

"I wouldn't say 'safe,' but they have the best pie I've ever tasted."

"'Pie'?" The word meant nothing.

"It's like, the name escapes me, the one with all the spices that you cook upside down,"

Tern nodded.

"—but with less buttercream… soft, fruity, warm… really defies explanation. Get on home, your father will notice you're missing and be worried. We'll be in to check the palace transports soon, we can't have this happening on a regular basis. Until then, try to stay out of them."

Tern watched as Walter shut the door. There was no need to tell him twice. One more outing like this, one more kneeling in a fireplace, and perhaps he could not save himself.