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Synopsis

The Twin Cities of Liath and Tamren. Home to a multitude of races, faiths, and industries, the Cities are a destination for immigrants seeking their fortune and relative freedom. Once an outpost of the world's greatest empire, the Cities have since flourished under the benign negligence of the Gash, a formerly nomadic warrior tribe taken root as Liath-Tamren's aristocracy. Now, though, the river that divides the Cities carries change on its currents. While their overlords scheme on unwitting, the peoples of Liath-Tamren have begun to eye one another suspiciously again.

One day, the boy Pinchlin's destitute, drunken father makes a bold promise of impending riches, a return to the comfortable life they lost so mysteriously, and so suddenly, a year ago. Instead, he vanishes. Pinchlin will be drawn quickly into a web of dueling sorcerous cults, racial unrest, and foreign intrigue that threaten to throw the Cities into chaos.

The Three Faces of Dissatisfaction is the first book from American fantasy author M.C. Burnell. Fascinating for its milieu as much as its action and characters, The Three Faces is a fantasy adventure for anyone who has ever loved a city.

Excerpt

Alary

Keeping to one of the room's corners in order to remain as unobtrusive as possible, Alary examined the apparition that had just entered the shop. The woman appeared almost normal, with regular features giving witness to the mixed Gash and Liathm heritage so common in the Cities. Her dark hair had been pulled back in a sloppy queue, and her brown breeches and plain linen shirt were workmanlike, although her tall boots were of the finest quality leather and gleamed with recent polish. None of that mattered, though; the only aspect of this woman's appearance that did was a woad mark on her otherwise unremarkable face. It meant that she did not need to attempt to impress anyone.

Normally Alary's duties included greeting customers the moment they came through the door, but being spoken to by a mere shopgirl might offend one such as she, and in any event, she was hardly a customer, was she? The situation was quite the opposite.

Thankfully, Master Tojer had awaited her arrival behind the counter. Now he rushed out from behind its embrace to bow respectfully. The woman nodded, her demeanor neither warm nor cold, her expression neutral. Business-like.

"Exalted Mistress," he said, punctuating his recognition with a bow.

"Tulka Tojer?" The woman asked, nodding again to herself at his acknowledgment.

All necessary civility apparently concluded, she began hammering Master Tojer with a barrage of questions in rapid sequence. When had the break-in occurred? What had been taken? Suspects? Estimated value of inventory? You heard nothing? Family all living upstairs: they heard nothing? Any old grudges? Trouble with local kids? Neighbors?

Then the questions became more abstruse: Master Tojer's birthdate, the ascendant saint that week, his family were Rehaddeline? How many children? Any still births? And Liathm-Gash descent, yes, locals, she could see that, and how many generations in the Cities consecutively?

The shopkeeper responded to the questions as best he could, struggling manfully not to be swept under by the tide of inquiry. Some of them he could not answer, but the woman only gestured impatiently when he told her he did not know and leapt on to the next of her interminable questions.

The litany, the brisk back-and-forth, was almost mesmerizing. Alary felt her ears go vaguely out of focus, and her eyes followed. Thus, it came as a complete shock to find the woman standing alarmingly close to her, looking directly into her face.

"This is your assistant?" She barked over her shoulder, never really taking her eyes off Alary's face. When Master Tojer replied in the affirmative, she added, "Your only one? Well, and your name, girl? You are here every day? One day off a week, fine. Were you here during the incident?"

"What?" Alary exclaimed with more incredulity than she probably should have when speaking to this woman. "I mean, no, it happened overnight, and I don't board here. My landlady locks the door at nine."

The woman's mouth twitched as though she might smile, but instead barked out another question. "Have you noticed anything strange lately? People lingering, not buying anything? Hanging around across the street? Anything odd that the proprietor might not have noticed?"

Relieved not to be asked all those odd personal questions, even if she could not offer any useful answers, Alary said, "No, nothing like that. Only the brick."

"Yes, this brick." The woman turned back to Master Tojer, and Alary released a quiet sigh of relief not to be the object of her attention any longer. "The same night as the break in, you said?"

"It was," Master Tojer replied, and pointed to the front of the shop. "Right through that window there, the largest one. We only just had the glazier in yesterday. We were locking up for the day, the till already emptied. We both ran to the window. Any number of people in the street--well, it was still busy at that time of day, with people going home to dinner--and most of them were staring at the shop, because of the noise, I assume. No one seemed to know what had happened: I called out to those nearest and they had seen nothing."

"You still have the brick?"

Master Tojer scurried away through the back door, to his office. He returned momentarily bearing a single brick upon the open palms of both hands as if it were some holy offering. Alary looked at it. It was a brick, dusty red and uninteresting, like any other. The woman took it with an expression of intense concentration and raised it to her eyes, where she examined every inch of its surface minutely, running her fingers along its rough length and muttering to herself. Finally she lowered the thing, holding it casually at her hip in one hand.

"Well, proprietor, you have a bit of a strange situation here. If I had to guess, which I don't like doing," and here she leveled a stern look at Master Tojer as if he had suggested otherwise, "I would say the purpose of this humble brick was that of a decoy, a scout, to determine what security measures you had in place. Finding the way clear..." She shrugged. "I can't tell you why they took nothing. That's what the polismen are for, after all, figuring criminals out. That's why you pay your no doubt iniquitous taxes. What you hired me to do, I can do very well indeed." She handed the brick back to Master Tojer with an air of ceremony. "Next bastard who throws a brick at your shop will find it coming right back at him."

Without further ado, the woman pulled a small role of black leather from some recess inside her cloak. Striding purposefully over to the counter, she untied the thong that held it closed and unrolled the leather to reveal an assortment of differently colored grease pencils, each one tucked neatly into its own pocket. She untied the thongs of her cloak as well, tossing it across the counter.

Master Tojer watched her for a moment, clearly vacillating between his conflicting desires not to disturb the sorceror and to be helpful. Finally he cleared his throat delicately. "Meddressahn, should we close the shop and leave you to work in peace?"

"What? No, no; no need to disturb your routine. These wards will need to work around you, and your customers, and so I must as well." The woman had not even looked up as she made this strange pronouncement, busy examining her pencils.

Alary had a busy day ahead, because Master Tojer had been struck once again by the zeal of a true obsessive, and had devised a new system of organization for the shelf dedicated to philosophy. Once this had been completed to his satisfaction, which might take most of the day, she needed to clean the glass on the locked display cases that held the most valuable books, precious because of age or rarity, or because they had been painstakingly illuminated and so were works of art in their own right. Then she would dust the shop carefully, a daily task; it was appalling how much dust could accumulate in a room full of books, and no one was going to buy a book if they pulled it off a shelf to find it covered in hair and cobwebs.

She found it extremely difficult to concentrate on her tasks, however, with sorcery being performed in the very room where she labored. The Meddressahn started by crawling across the floor, first in the very center of the room--or so Alary assumed, because the woman had taken a small eternity pacing and measuring to find it--then moving to each corner, then the doors, one to the street, one to the hallway that led to the water closet, the office, and the stairs to the basement and upper floors. Everywhere she paused, she produced her pencils, etching unfathomable symbols onto the wooden floor, always muttering to herself just loudly enough that Alary could discern that the language was none she recognized.

Once she had finished with the floor, the sorceror began another circuit of the room, this time kneeling to work, scraping her symbols onto the walls at the height of her own waist. In time, Alary realized that the woman was not simply working in a circle around the space. Instead, she moved back and forth across the room, from one side of the door to the street, to a far corner, back to the front window, to a wall on the other side of the room, and so on. Like she wove a web about the room, back and forth.

By lunchtime, the Meddressahn had progressed to reaching higher than her own head. Occasionally she paused to rub her lower back, or rolled her shoulders and head, proof that, whatever their miraculous powers, sorcerors were made of flesh and bone like any other. Shaking her head at the strangeness of having a sorceror in the shop, not as a customer, which was not unheard of, but actually working her sorcery around them, Alary closed the door gently behind herself.

Only once she had stepped out onto the sidewalk did she realize what a relief it was to escape the shop for an hour. The air in that room had become hot and tense and incredibly dry, a feeling like static in the air, no doubt due to the proximity of sorcery. The unpleasant sensation only became so obvious now that she stood in the humid warmth of a sunny spring day.

Ducking into the small greengrocer's down the street, she bought a cold cheese pie from the display of premade meals for workers in the area who, like Alary, had no kitchen of their own to return to for their noon meal and could not afford to eat at a restaurant: her usual lunch on a work day. After some consideration, she went to the bucket of brine and ladled a handful of black olives into a waxed-paper bag. A celebration, for having witnessed actual sorcery, for having it woven around her. Such an experience might never occur again, and she was not entirely sure that was to be regretted, but still. An event worth acknowledging.

Mistress Dugla, the enormously fat greengrocer, smiled at her as warmly as usual; Alary might never purchase anything of particular value, but she had been a regular customer since she first came to work at the bookshop a year ago. The woman's warm smile blossomed into radiance at the sight of the olives. "My stick of a girl finally considers eating a proper meal!" She called out triumphantly, her voice as always shockingly high and delicate emerging from such a vast and coarse woman.

"How's old Tojer?" She continued as she counted out Alary's change. "Not good, no doubt, not good. How could he be, with that harridan in his house? I told him all those years ago he should marry me, an enterprising woman after his own heart, but he ignored my advice and went and married her, instead. And who was right, I ask you?"

Alary could not disagree with this, given her boss's state of perpetual domestic misery, although the thought of studious, scholarly Master Tojer wed to this boisterous woman did rather defy her imagination. Mistress Dugla evidently saw clear confirmation in her eyes, however, because she nodded sadly.

Completely ignoring the line of men and women waiting behind Alary at the register with their food, she lamented, "And now the poor man is plagued by lawbreakers. What are these Cities come to, I ask you, when criminals feel free to come all the way up from their slums to harass decent, hardworking people? Sorceror still at the shop?" When Alary nodded, the woman continued relentlessly, "Yes, poor man, that'll cost him an arm and a leg. Too bad he can't sell off his wife and family to cover the expense, eh? Well, anyway, the Meddressahn will do right by him, sure enough, he'll not be troubled again once the sorcerors are done working their craft."

Her opinions on the matter finally exhausted, Mistress Dugla waved her away, and Alary was able to escape back onto the street. She made her way to Ste. Dangeria's and took a seat on the steps leading up to the cathedral, where she could sit in the sunlight while she ate. She wanted to enjoy the freshness of spring air and light as much as possible before she had to reenter the febrile claustrophobia in the shop. Re, would it fade?

She contemplated the sorcery while she ate. Between bites of her cold pie, she popped olives in her mouth, maneuvering them carefully between gum and cheek as she chewed the pungent, salty flesh off its tenacious pit. If that flesh-tingling discomfort was going to be permanent, it seemed almost as much a curse as a blessing. What customer would be willing to linger long enough to make a purchase while every hair on his body stood on end? Not to mention the symbols; in every color of the rainbow, they covered a significant portion of the exposed wood in the shop already, and would only be more profuse by the time the work was finished. What value, protecting the shop's stock from theft, if it could never then be sold?

If whoever had broken in had intended theft at all... That troubled her. She had arrived at the shop at her usual time to find a distressed Master Tojer, list of inventory in hand, feverishly examining his shelves for loss. Evidently he had come down in the morning to find the door to the street standing open. By lunch, he had determined that nothing had been taken. Nothing! They could have been after the money, and of course they would not have found it, because Master Tojer did not leave anything in the till overnight. But surely even common criminals were intelligent enough to look around the shop at the luxurious woodwork and the wealth of leather-bound books and make the obvious connection: this shop sold valuable inventory. Books that could be stolen and sold for a profit in turn.

A mystery, indeed.

Once she had finished her lunch, Alary crumpled up the paper wrappings and deposited them conscientiously in a rubbish bin lurking discreetly between hedges at the foot of the cathedral's granite steps. Around her, a crowd bustled; most of these people were shop clerks and other petty laborers in the neighborhood, clutching paper sacks containing bought lunches, sandwiches and pies, coming to eat their lunch as she had, in the beautiful sunlight. These were folk who spent all day on their feet; you could tell by the quiet grunts of relief as they settled onto the stone, taking the weight off for this brief respite.

Suddenly, though, she had the awful sensation that someone was watching her. She turned around in a circle, trying to catch the watcher. Everywhere she looked, though, she found calm faces, eyes turned inward. A sea of men in brown and black, women in gray and blue, plain modest clothing appropriate to folks who spent all day standing behind a counter, or buffing nobles' fingernails or teaching their children elocution, or any of the multitude of similar pursuits that occupied the people of Clovis and Basilisk.

None of them were looking at her, because none of them cared who she was or what she was doing, and why would they? Just as she recognized herself in them, they would know her at a glance. And dismiss her. Still, the horrible, crawling sensation along her spine persisted. Shaking her head, she hastened her steps back to the shop, trying to dismiss her unease.

Back in the shop, she stopped in her tracks. She had almost forgotten the feverish tenseness in the shop, in her haste to escape that feeling of being watched. Now it clamped down on her, all the more unsettling after the freshness outside. She glanced at the Meddressahn, and saw that the woman had progressed to the very margin between walls and ceiling now; she stood on a chair, etching away and muttering as before.

"Ah, Miss Lemarn," Master Tojer exclaimed, "the work progresses, as you see." Noticing her intent stare, he made his way over to stand beside her. "It does rather draw the eye, doesn't it?"

"It's the feeling that bothers me," she admitted, rubbing her arms briskly.

"Feeling?" Master Tojer repeated, sounding puzzled and maybe a bit concerned.

"Like a thunderstorm nearby?" The sorceror asked suddenly, making them both jump. When Alary admitted that, yes, that was rather the feeling, the woman nodded absently, still intent upon her work. "Some ordinary people have a sensitivity to sorcery when it's being worked too close by," she explained. "Makes them all twitchy and miserable. Don't worry, it'll vanish as soon as I finish with what I'm doing."

"A sensitivity?" Her boss asked, obviously both surprised and very curious.

"Like I said, just a feeling some ordinary folks get. Doesn't mean they're sorcerors in disguise." And before either of them could ask, she added, "It's not very common, but not really rare, either."

Alary shared a brief look of shock with her boss before he retreated back behind the counter. She went into the office to retrieve the duster and a rag for polishing the wood.

She had not progressed far in this task when a thump turned her around. The Meddressahn had jumped down from her chair, and stood stretching her back in obvious misery. And no wonder. Alary saw that even the ceiling had received its share of colorful sigils. With a last roll of her head, the woman went to stand atop the first symbol she had drawn that morning, directly in the center of the room; also, Alary saw, directly beneath a larger one on the ceiling above, probably the last one drawn. Or at least, that would have a sensible symmetry.

Standing there atop her work, she bowed her head, eyes closed. The tingling discomfort intensified abruptly, so that Alary felt as if her entire body where wrapped in too-tight clothing, every inch of her skin itching with dry energy. She glanced behind the counter briefly and saw that Master Tojer, too, watched the sorceror with rapt attention. The woman raised her arms out to her sides, then with a grasping motion, both hands bunching into fists, she pulled her arms hard into her chest. The feeling of tension heightened until Alary felt an almost audible vibration in her every bone.

After a moment, the Meddressahn relaxed, and just like that, Alary's discomfort vanished. As had, she realized with a shock, every last trace of the colored symbols from floor, walls, and ceiling. Dusting her hands together with an air of modest satisfaction, the sorceror walked over to the counter and began tucking her pencils away again.

Copyright © 2010 by M. C. Burnell

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