Resistance Begins At Home

A few months ago now, I ran an excerpt, Chapter 1 of a novel called Katerina's Loss, which will be the second book in my Boyar's Curse series.

For this week's story, I'm putting up Chapter 2 of Katerina's Loss for your enjoyment.

Chapter 2: Resistance Begins at Home - an excerpt from Katerina's Loss, a novel by M. K. Dreysen

There were spaces, intervals, little pieces of time and energy. They came on from the endless space, perhaps as random occurences.

She didn't choose to see randomness, chaos. She chose to count these as regular intervals. Exhausted patience, measures.

Of the capacity of her captors.

The first stake by which she measured her confinement was, as it must be, the night she was captured. The train ran from Boston to New York, and back again. Katerina Malagena was booked beneath the lights. Eight performances a week. She gave them her all.

And then once a month, took back a little. Three days away to somewhere anywhere that her face and her voice and the dance in her step went unrecognized.

Ok, try instead undemanded. She was hardly a household name. No Caruso, no Schumann, and her adoring throngs typically consisted of Times reporters angling for a drink and a good time. The drinks she allowed, because why not?

Good times she reserved for her own enjoyment. The train to Boston being a simple example. And in July, when the nights in the city grew toward uncomfortable? New England held its oppressive states, she didn't argue it. But it was better than New York, for just a few weeks longer, and that was enough. Katie had enjoyed the snow falls in December, the changing of the leaves in September, but that she required a light coat, even in July... that was something else again.

A reminder perhaps... but no. Long ago and far away and if she ever ran into Rik again that would be the time to maneuver.

She'd booked the trip to England on a whim. The train went through Sandy Hook; the flyer in her New York hotel had been too appealing, that day, to pass up.

Katie stepped off the boat in Blackpool with no ideas. Other than that Katerina Malagena was no longer among the living. Or the dead, but Katie had no intention of adding useful information to that pile. She had new lives to consider.

"Then why'd we need to return to the old world to find them?" she asked herself. Getting no answer, she boarded yet another train. To Dover, and the continent beyond, assuming the boats were in good order. And they were, so the world awaited.

Money she had. This was almost more inconvenience than aid, given the nuisance of wiring ahead. But an unaccompanied woman required pretense. The fees she'd collected from the performances in New York were sufficient to the means. And her banks were, after all, no longer an ocean and a fair few languages away...

Amsterdam and then Brussels were as good a route as any. It was only when she stood outside the antiquities shop, window display nothing more than dust with obscure methods of arranging it, that she admitted there might have been something else at work.

The stones, hidden discretely away, in various places. They whispered to her now, standing in front of this shop. "Connections... Tales... Information..." they said.

"Power?" they hoped.

"Even as stones, you believe yourselves only a moment away?" she whispered. Not disbelievingly. She'd held them too long, she had some knowledge now of their nature, these stone and earth and fire creatures.

They collected themselves, and threw their will against their prison. The matrix which bound them didn't even vibrate in response to their effort. An old game this.

Katie placed her hands in her pockets. Between seams, under her left hand, she'd sewn in a pocket for holding one of the stones. There was room enough for her finger to find the sapphire. At her touch, the stone opened her eyes and mind to the place around.

The place inside the window. Most of it, documents, silver tarnished brass steel porcelain and paintings the proprietor let go for pennies or pounds or a good entertaining story. The profit was in the being there, this proprietor believed, and the stories that wandered in.

The silver and gold kept the roof over her head, and the taxes paid, and the bread and meat and the fresh vegetables, wasn't the world so much more alive when she had a fresh orange in her hand, and wasn't the little girl she'd been so much closer when she bit the flesh and dribbled the juice down her chin?

"Thessalina..." Katie whispered. She stepped to the side of the window, and up against the wall. She could see now, and the stone and its spirit would hide her from eyes and ears while she did this thing. "A name of story? From story?"

Thess's father had taught her this way. She's seen no need to change it. Her shelves were filled with loving, and hating, and all those tales families told themselves of their grandfather's sword, their Aunt Gretchen's silver, the precious few books they held.

Few of them worth much to others, all of them priceless. Katie let these go by her inquisitive mind. These quiescent objects awaited forgetfulness and the touch of a hero in equal measure.

There were legends in the store, however. Three of them slumbered among the rest. Katie let her spirit move in their orbits, webs. The letter had been here the longest, it lived in the bottom of a secretary's drawer, in the back along the eastern wall where the owner did her daily books, or just read a novel when it suited her to do so rather than bow to the necessity of work. The letter sat in a comfortable pile of other letters and receipts and bits and pieces the owner had stashed here because she had simply opened the drawer and found a spot.

"My Dear Amerigo," the letter began. It ended "With warmest regards, Leonardo." Between was description, or perhaps yet imaginative projection, of a planned voyage. To first the new continent, and then... "The Atlantean occurence is rare, Amerigo. A thousand lifetimes might yet pass before we mere mortals are blessed again with this possibility."

The letter itself breathed of legend and story, the parchment and the ink burned in Katie's eye. As well blew the whispers of what could come, would come, the fire in the deep that awaited this letter's discovery some few decades hence.

Katie smiled, hearing now the clatter of something very like typewriter keys and the chatter of a descendant of the telegraph as secrets and dreams spun their way to conspiracy.

The photograph sat in a hat box dedicated to that task. Daguerrotypes, postcards, the image nestled among the sights of the world grand and personal. Between a picture of the Eiger on paper barely larger than a postage stamp, and a much larger portrait of a Native American wearing significant regalia, the photograph in question spent its time.

The subject should never have sat for a photograph. Oh, Josephine had appeared in portraits and paintings beyond number. The Empress had reason to. But the Niepce and Daguerre processes were only in their infancy, barely yet more than fancies of imagination when the Empress died.

And yet here her image appeared, as a young woman. Perhaps before the revolution? Katie had no feel for the period, she'd left Paris to her father. At the time she'd been far more interested in Istanbul, Damascus, the Ottoman Empire more generally. She'd gone there with some interest in how the place had developed since Constantinople, once there lost herself to its stories and timelessness.

The photograph spoke of mysteries hints impossibilities. Accusation of forgeries cunningly wrought. A university professor, still in swaddling cloth at this day, would discover it. Raise it to the world as an example of the invidious cunning of the master con man. The photograph dreamt of its place in the archives of a Swedish university, a curiosity; a place where her smile would await to tantalize generations of students with "Could it possibly be?"

The photograph and the letter spoke to Katie; she let them whisper together, two old neighbors gossiping over their back fence. She let her spirit-knowledge-observation turn and sift and there.

The third object of interest, power, lay by itself on a desk, between the blotter and its placeholder. Slipped between as it might have gone by accident, hidden, an afterthought. Just a penny, in an obscure place as those most common coins so often find themselves. This one spoke of centuries, millenia.

Which Katie rather liked, all things considered.

The penny whispered to her of journeys, miles and miles. As with the photograph and the letter, this coin claimed an impossibility. It claimed the lineage of Wu Zhu, this coin did, and the stamping and the hole in the center belied it. But its travels... this coin had seen the Roman Republic and the Empire.

It had travelled the Levant, only in far more interesting times, and far more intimately, than Katie's time there. Lies, stories, it showed her a hill and cruciform torture under sunset; Jerusalem and a man who carried dreams of prophecy and that which may yet come. The centurions with blood on their swords and a mountain with the cries of women and children between its skirts.

Justinian stood and poured this coin, and a fistful of others, into the hands of a gathered trio: "You will deliver drawings of what we have dreamt here. All this and more for a concrete expression of my desire." And the coin was there in the pocket of the engineer when the Hagia came to life. It had lost the burnished sheen from his thumb, the engineer rubbing the coin in tension throughout his day's efforts. It had been long since the coin was polished.

These and more, the coin claimed to have been present for. Ransoms, tolls, bribes, the penny had exchanged hands at the behest of the dukes and the peasants, and seen the world in the doing.

The last passage it spoke of, before finding itself to the family whose desk had been lost under a pile of old cloth for the past two centuries, was one of torture and madness. The coin had exchanged hands, south, through the African trade, in humans now. Across the Atlantic then, on a passage of death and despair, into the hands of children. Time thin and malleable until more ship-born passage, to Halifax and a ship's yard to help pay for a beer, the sailor having had his fill of rum and needing nothing more in this world at that moment than a reminder of bitter brown ale and the home he'd left across the water. The sailor came back with the coin as change just a few days later; he'd changed ships, to bring himself through malaria and the hallucinations and the end in Belfast, just miles short of home.

This coin, of all of them, Katie would have. She let the stone's view of the shop fade, dim enough so that she could walk into the shop and be recognized. Near enough so that the coin's presence never left her mind.

Katie walked the wares, never betraying her interest, and knowledge. The books, she ran her hands over their spines, and the dust she pushed aside with two fingers, or an elbow. In the back, a wardrobe spoke to her, hinted of something, some story it might yet be privy to, but that was tomorrow not today and yet only a possibility. There were more legends in waiting, Katie had discovered, than actualiities thereof.

She drew three postcards from the photograph's hatbox. Not the photo itself, no, but she would need reason to have browsed. And, the lady behind the counter, chatting of family now and their delight in the interesting and the widely travelled, did have bills to pay, no matter her true heart's desire.

There it was. Next to what looked like a druggist's case, the desk and the case crammed into less space than either would have preferred and the blotter and her fingers found it. Just at the edge, Katie slid a finger beneath the placeholder, then pinched the coin into her palm.

She had no idea of the coin's place in the world, whether its stories were lies or truths hard won. No matter. As the shop's proprietor would have it, Katie knew stories and legends for power long before this place existed. She was just the listener this coin had been waiting for. Katie left the small payment, and a little more besides, that the lady behind the counter requested, and then left that place. To arrange for lodgings, and to find out of the way places.

The kind just right for hearing of tales and travels.

The kind of contemplation just perfect for distraction. Perhaps... perhaps Katie might have gone to the train station. Just then, she may have escaped what was to come.

But that's not the way it happened. But before she sank into the coin's stories, or maybe they were lies, she first wandered into a shop selling ink and paper. When she sat at the first of the succession of cafe tables, she set out the creamy thick paper and the pen and the ink. For no reason. Perhaps for notes, and drawings of the views through the coin's eye.

For two days, mornings over coffee, lunch over tea, dinner over wine, she sketched and made notes. Of places and people and the actions that they performed.

And Katie wrote, then discarded, a note to her father. Three times she did this thing.

The coin's lies, or perhaps they were stories, absorbed her attention. Enough so that the four people, two women dressed in the most modern of styles, two men somewhat less refined, drifted in and out of her peripheral vision. In pairs, they would join her at a cafe. Or across the street. Lingering over papers or coffee or conversation in a language she didn't quite remember.

Late on the evening of the second day, Katie tore her third attempt at a letter to shreds. Then stood, to pack everything away and return to the hotel. Whatever the coin's truth, or not, she'd need more than a few hours of contemplation to unriddle it. The weave of them may have been nothing more than a bauble's moment...

The ladies chatting behind her were concerned now with rumors and portents. Gossip, from the court of the Habsburgs.

Which gossip Katie had heard just yesterday. From the same pair.

She didn't stop her hands. Katie encouraged them, in their picking up and placing of things in the leather bag, really more of a horseman's saddlebag than anything remotely fashionable. It was the most practical of bags, and it held all of her papers and notes and failed attempts at letters. She let her hands do this work while her mind sifted through the past two days.

For glimpses of the pair of gossipers. Were they alone? Katie wondered. How many more? She felt, believed, there had been more, but if so, she couldn't yet match the brief memories and hints with concrete evidence. Such as the gossip she'd heard now twice, in the same rhythms and tiny little gasps, of the little pieces of power Franz Josef's nephew had begun to wield. As though these things mattered to anyone outside of the court.

Katie slung the saddlebag over her shoulder, smiled at the waiter as he moved in to clear the table. Denied her hand when it reached for the ruby. Not here, not now. The evening sun had not yet relinquished its hold, too many people too much attention she would have to wait.

For the pair of men who couldn't quite allow her to walk around the corner. They gave themselves away just a breath or two before she made the turn. And once they did, she catalogued them. At lunch today, they'd taken a seat on tables to either side of her, the mustachioed one had read the London Times, the same one he carried under his arm now.

The bald one had read the Berliner Morgenpost. But he'd at least thrown his morning read away, in favor now of the Borsen-Courier. Which spoke of his broad mindedness. Or perhaps his capacity for humor. Either way, Katie led the two to her hotel.

Which they knew well enough, as they didn't quite make the turn onto the street. Satisfied of her unawareness? If she'd wanted to, that would have been the perfect time to disappear, to leave her four interested observers to their games. Let them play if they must.

Except she wondered, as she made her way to the back room, on the left out of the lift, no of course she didn't require a view, it would only distract her. And who needed the noise while she was trying to sleep?

Safe in her room, door locked, Katie scattered the stones on the desk, and laid the penny between them. Rough, unpolished but for her fingers and time, and the tarnished coin joined the chorus from the spirits bound.

They told a story, two stories together. First, that Katie had had no opportunity to run. The pair of women had sped their way, by carriage, to a safe house across the street. They observed her passage through the hotel doors. If she'd taken the chance and run, Katie would have had been taken before she could reach the station.

Second story: that the coin was bait in a trap. And not for Katie. "No, she's been dead and gone for three centuries at least." And yet here the coin was, and the people arrayed to take Lian. Where?

The stones and the coin showed her a building, of stone and glass, a church or no. An abbey, hidden away by forest and time and space, some little refuge from the world's cares turned now to a new purpose. The four watchers, and a dozen or more of their compatriots coming along to affect the trap itself... they were as lights in the darkness, close yet still some hours away. The watchers had wired the abbey, the trap had been sprung.

"Who are you, that you believe me to be Lian?" Katie asked the stones. Their origin, the abbey... yet much of this answer was yet hidden from her. Lian had died, Katie had buried her godmother herself, beneath a maple tree overlooking Niagara Falls. And yet here Lian, her actions her legends the fear of her, reached out from the grave after centuries. "Who are you, that you won't come looking for me, or Rik, next?"

Or the others, the shadow children, those lost and re-created and de novo beings hidden from the reach of knowledge. Some lifelong enemies there, some allies of convenience, some of them she protected. But none of them would she leave to be hunted as animals.

When Katie wrote this time, "Father, I need your help." In the old Greek the words came, what little she knew or could guess. "The Church is moving against the children. I know not yet what or how, but they come for me now. They believe me to be Lian, yet she is dust these long years. What do they fear so, Father? And why?"

She wrapped the letter, tight, small. Poked among the stones, chose the emerald so that he would know with certainty. "Where to hide it?" she asked the stones. "Where, who..."

She left for the antique shop. If it were good enough to serve as her trap, it were good enough to serve as her saving grace. She paused only to insure that the other stones were back in their places, between seams and other hidden pockets.

Behind, she left only the coin, sitting in the middle of the desk. "Let them come," she told the coin. "I need only a few hours, and a little luck."

It was enough to distract them. Time enough to drift out the back door, across the city to the curio shop. "I must beg of you one small favor."

The wardrobe, the apothecary's case, these things and more would, she knew, find their way to Rik. Some few decades hence, he would open the drawers and find her note, and the emerald.

This knowledge was small comfort when she stepped from the shop and into the arms of those who'd come to take her. Small.

But as strong as a spider's anchor in the foggy dawn. Her father would come. Eventually. And in the mean time, Katerina would discover just who these people were, and why they and the Church behind them had turned their attention to her world.