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  STONESKIN

  Prequel to the Deep Witches Trilogy

  K.B. Spangler

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2017 K.B. Spangler.

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  Stoneskin: Prequel to the Deep Witches Trilogy is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are the creations of the author. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Additional information can be found at kbspangler.com

  Copyright © 2017 by K.B. Spangler

  Cover art by K.B. Spangler

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in printed or electronic form without permission from the author.

  Available from Smashwords.com and other retail outlets.

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  _________________________________

  In my opinion, the most curious trait about the Deep is its need to communicate. It leaves me little notes throughout the day. I have collected these for the better part of a millennium, even though they are completely unintelligible to me. There may be an order to them, but I cannot see it.

  —Williamson, “Notes from the Deep,” 16 July 4406 CE

  _________________________________

  Chapter One

  Tembi Moon was eight years old when she fell between the worlds.

  This isn’t the story of Tembi Moon. This is the story of Tembi Stoneskin, and the story of Tembi Songbird, but it began the day when Tembi Moon fell and woke somewhere…

  …else?

  There’s a universal nature of all alleys, and Tembi Moon had spent enough time in the ones on Adhama to recognize that she was propped up against the wall of an alley the moment she woke. She didn’t remember how she got there, or why. There was nothing in her head between waking in her own small bed that morning and finding herself in this…place. (Yes, it was definitely an alley—a thin corridor between two high walls, with piles of what could only be garbage throughout.) But this alley was like nothing Tembi had ever seen, wet and green, a soft carpet of fast-growing plants running across the garbage and up the walls and—

  When she looked down, she found they were starting to take her legs.

  She gasped and scrambled to her feet. It was slick—everything was slick!—and she fell, face-first, into the garbage.

  Green tendrils stretched towards her as if to seize her eyes.

  This time, she screamed.

  Footsteps—she looked up to see wide, thick shoes crashing towards her. Above those, a green-skinned man, whose body was otherwise human until it got to his elbows and then those bent wrong. Tembi tried to find her balance, tried to crawl away, tried to hide under the garbage, but the green man with the huge feet and the wrong kind of elbows caught her up and lifted her out of the muck.

  Behind him was a woman, and she was also green and wrong.

  Tembi fought him, but the man was strong and it was like punching wood. He spoke in sharp, almost angry tones; then, the woman tried softness, and Tembi recognized a mother’s pleading for peace. Tembi searched and, yes, two green children stood behind the green woman, kept from entering the alley by their mother’s outstretched hands.

  It was the children that did it—Tembi stopped fighting. Their father carried her from the alley and set her down on a flat wooden surface that was mostly clear of the grabbing plants. The mother took out a soft cloth and started to clean the muck from the alley off of Tembi’s face, all the while talking to Tembi, smooth and gentle, smooth and gentle.

  The green children were younger than Tembi. The larger child made a face at her, his long fingers pricking up to mimic Tembi’s own ears. She giggled at the boy; his mother smiled at them both.

  They had drawn something of a crowd, green faces with their earthy eyes, all of them staring down at her. Tembi couldn’t bear to look at them, so she tried to take in the facts of the street, with the buildings and shops that were so close to those of home, but also not. The doors opened the right way; the windows didn’t. There was no metal or stone anywhere she could see, only wood and green-colored plass, and all of this slightly soggy from the damp air. The plants that ran rampant in the alley were trying to eat the street; down the road, two men with long wooden blades were slicing and scraping the plants from the buildings.

  Wooden buildings? Wooden streets? She kept checking the sky to make sure it stayed clear—a single storm would bring every scrap of this town tumbling to the ground.

  The mother chased the crowd away with hand claps and gestures that made the boy laugh. Tembi told them her name: she repeated sounds when prompted, and the delight on the little girl’s face made Tembi think she had said the child’s name correctly. But there was no way to tell them who she was, or where she was from, or how badly she wanted her own mother, not this strange woman whose arms bent the wrong way and who smelled too much like a vegetable.

  The green man knelt beside the woman. There was some discussion; the woman inspected Tembi’s right hand, then asked Tembi something using s l o w w o r d s that still had no meaning. The man held up his own hand and tapped his wrist; his children did the same.

  Tembi felt as if she was failing, and began to cry again.

  More green men arrived. She was transferred from the family’s care to theirs: the father took the children and left; the mother rooted herself beside Tembi, and held her hand while she cried.

  “Witch,” said one of the men. It was one word nearly lost among others, but Tembi’s head whipped towards the familiar. He repeated himself; all she recognized was “Witch.”

  Another green-skinned woman arrived.

  No—she appeared. Even through her tears, Tembi had been watching the sky, and this new woman was tall enough to be caught in the edges of that. One moment the street around them was clear, and then she…appeared…in a cloud of white-and-silver robes.

  She has money, was Tembi’s first thought at seeing her. Then: She’s a Witch!

  Tembi had never met a Witch, but she had seen plenty of them on the channels. They always dressed like money wasn’t real. Some, like this one, had a patch of painted skin twisting from their ear to their collarbone. The paint on this Witch was done up in tree branches, bare winter branches, black skeletons that were stark against her left cheek. These vanished beneath the folds of a white-and-silver scarf the Witch wore loose around her shoulders.

  And the Witch herself? She looked angry. Furious. An ageless face with tight eyes. The green-skinned men stepped away; the mother tried to put herself between the Witch and Tembi.

  No. That couldn’t happen. The Witch was her way home. Tembi pulled away from the mother, from the men.

  The Witch saw her, and the fury that had pulled her eyes tight disappeared. “Hello,” she said to Tembi, in Tembi’s own language. “I’m pleased to meet you, Tembi Moon. May we take you home?”

  Those who were near enough to hear the Witch froze at the sound of her multilayered voice. The Witch was not alone in her body.

  B
ut…home.

  “How do you know me?” she asked, as she took another cautious step towards the Witch and her unseen rider. “Did you bring me here?”

  “Oh.” The Witch saw all of Tembi for the first time. “Oh, you poor thing.”

  Tembi clenched her fists; she was a mess, she knew that. The Witch didn’t have to point it out in front of everyone.

  “Let’s get you some food,” the Witch said. The vibrato had left her voice; she spoke gently but with the confidence of someone who expected to be obeyed. She knelt and extended her long-fingered hand.

  “Did you bring me here?!” Tembi insisted.

  “Me? No,” the Witch said. She had an accent now, as if Tembi’s language were suddenly awkward in her mouth. “But I will bring you home.”

  “Promise?”

  The Witch almost smiled. “Promise.”

  That was that. Tembi took the Witch’s hand, and, green skin against Tembi’s own brown, they walked into the strange city together.

  Right before they turned a too-round corner, Tembi glanced over her shoulder. The kind mother from the alley had both of her hands pressed hard against her mouth, as if keeping herself from calling out. Then, the Witch took her down another street of plass and wood and green growing plants, and the woman was gone.

  The Witch took her through a door and into a single large room which smelled of fresh bread. There were many people in the room, eating and drinking all manner of things, and they smiled at the Witch as the two of them passed. Griddle cakes came next. Or, the Witch said they were griddle cakes, and they had the appearance of griddle cakes, but no griddle cake on Tembi’s world had ever tasted like straw. Her mother would have slapped her for turning down food, so Tembi ate every bite and ignored how her stomach twisted.

  Tembi stared at the empty plate in front of her, and then at the Witch, and then at the room. It was a large room, bigger even than her school back home, with green-skinned people eating at row after row of long wooden tables. Only she and the Witch sat alone; the green-skinned woman who had led them to a smaller private table came by with a pitcher of liquid whenever the Witch’s glass ran dry, but otherwise they had eaten in silence.

  “Where are we?” she asked the Witch.

  “This is Miha’ana,” the Witch replied. “The eighty-third planet in Perseus.”

  Tembi shook her head. “Why do you keep your food here?”

  The Witch took a quick breath and asked Tembi if she had ever been to a restaurant before.

  Tembi pricked her ears up, holding them as high as she could make them go. “Yes,” she said. “Of course I have! It’s different on my world, that’s all.”

  “Of course,” the Witch said, as the corners of her mouth crept up. “Well, on Miha’ana, we want to make our guests welcome. Would you like to come shopping with me before I take you home? I need new shoes, and I know where we could find some in your size.”

  Shoes. Tembi hiked up her legs and sat cross-legged on the wooden bench to hide her bare feet. “No, thank you,” she said.

  “Then will you walk with us, just for a little while?” The Witch was speaking in that melodic two-toned voice again. The sound of it cut straight through the quiet noise: the others in the room fell silent; a couple at the rear of the restaurant jumped up to leave, throwing ceramic chits across the long tables on their way out the door. “We want to talk to you.”

  Tembi didn’t like that, no, not at all. The Witch seemed nice enough, but she wasn’t just a Witch, no, not now. What if Tembi said the wrong thing? There was no one else who could take her home, not unless she found a ship and she had no idea how to do that. Ships might as well as be the stuff of stories, ideas that only existed in words and images on the channels. Besides, wouldn’t a ship need a Witch anyhow?

  She suddenly wished she had paid more attention in school.

  “I want to go home,” Tembi said, and remembered to add: “Thank you.”

  “Then we will take you home,” the Witch said. She stood and placed some of those chits on the edge of the wooden table. “We will take you straight to Adhama, straight to your neighborhood. Right to your doorstep, if you wish it.”

  Oh. Oh dear. Tembi hadn’t considered that. What would happen if she were to appear out of thin air? With a Witch?! Old Kayode had nothing to do except watch the streets and gossip. He would never—

  “Or,” the Witch added, unfolding the white-and-silver scarf as she spoke, “we could arrive somewhere quiet, somewhere just a little ways away from your home, if you don’t mind the walk.” The scarf went over and around the Witch’s head, hiding the painted branches. With her face in shadows, the Witch was also not so…so green.

  Yes, good—Tembi nodded as quickly as she dared.

  “But we’ve promised to see you home safely, so we will walk with you,” the Witch said. “Promise you won’t run off and leave us after we’ve jumped?”

  Tembi’s own eyes narrowed at the Witch.

  The Witch winked at her, and held out her hands.

  The girl hopped down from the bench. “Does it hurt?” she asked.

  “It’s like dreaming,” the Witch replied, as she folded her wrong-jointed arms around Tembi.

  The galaxy bent around them.

  _________________________________

  they come

  mother father

  far

  far

  they come

  Excerpt from “Notes from the Deep,” 16 July 3616 CE

  _________________________________

  Chapter Two

  Riding the Rails was very much like a dream, if a dream were made of nothing but song and colors and teeth and razor-sharp wings, but Tembi knew what the Witch meant: like a dream, it moved without moving.

  This is the Deep, Tembi realized, as ideas pulsed along with her heartbeat. I didn’t think it’d be so pretty.

  “Thank you,” the Witch replied in her two-toned voice. “That’s very kind of you.”

  And then Tembi was home.

  She knew the scent of her city as soon as the Witch opened her arms and let her go. Dry, almost musty, stone and metal slicing into each other. They had come out of the Deep in another alley, but this one was spotless (as alleys went). The buildings on either side were solid, with strong roofs and shutters open to expose the plass windows. The sun was bright; some of the windows were open—

  No. There were too many open windows. Too many shutters for one person to close if a storm rolled in without warning. The people on the street were dressed in robes much like Tembi’s, but these were made from thick cloth in bold patterns. Tembi took a few steps from the mouth of the alley and saw the ground was paved in straight lines of gray, but she didn’t recognize—

  A thick stripe of gold cut through the gray.

  Oh, gods! Yes, she did know where they were!

  “We have to go!” Tembi clutched at the Witch’s sleeve. “We can’t be here!”

  “Tembi?” The Witch sounded amused.

  “They’ll pop us,” she said, as she tried to pull the woman back into the safety of the alley. “We can’t be in the gold! We need to hide!”

  “Tembi,” the Witch said as she knelt so she could meet the girl’s eyes. “What’s wrong?”

  “We can’t be in the gold!” Tembi knew she was shaking; she couldn’t seem to stop. Her ears had flattened against her head so tightly she could barely hear. “They’ll pop us,” she insisted. “Take us somewhere else! Take me home! Take me home right now! I don’t care what Old Kayode thinks!”

  The Witch stood and walked out of the alley, straight into the center of the gold stripe.

  Tembi nearly screamed.

  “Come,” the Witch said. “I promised to take you home, and I will. But you promised to walk with me to your house.”

  “I didn’t promise anything,” Tembi said. With her ears pressed back along the sides of her head, she couldn’t help but hear the whine in her voice.

  The Witch raised an eyebrow, and sta
rted walking.

  Oh, gods!

  Tembi darted out of the alley, determined to try one last time. “Please, please get off the gold stripe—”

  Too late.

  A lawman, short and round, his long silver popstick slung over his shoulder on a thick leather strap. The law in this part of town wore blue robes over gold; the lawman moved towards the Witch so quickly that the thick fabric churned behind him.

  Tembi decided the Witch was on her own. She darted back into the alley, searching for a place to hide. There was…

  This alley is too clean!

  …there was nothing to hide behind! Which, in Tembi’s experience, never happened. Not in an alley! She said the kind of words that would make her own mother cringe as she grabbed a slick metal pipe and climbed as high as she could, just to make it harder for the lawman when he came to pop her.

  She clung to the pipe and shivered and looked towards the bright mouth of the alley and—

  Nothing happened.

  No, wait. Conversation happened.

  Tembi forced her ears forward to take in the sounds of the Witch and the lawman. They were speaking too quietly for her to hear their words, but the popstick was still in its sling. Maybe the Witch had agreed to leave? Sometimes the law let you off with a warning if they didn’t realize your pockets were full.

  “Tembi?” The Witch had returned to the mouth of the alley. The lawman was beside her; he had gathered the bottom of his robes around his boots in a gesture of penance. “You can come out now.”

  “Why?”

  The Witch followed Tembi’s voice up the side of the building. “Oh!” she said, as she pressed a long-fingered hand against her lips. Tembi had the sneaking suspicion the Witch was trying not to laugh. “Come down, then. The lawman would like to say something to you.”