Excerpt

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Isa Day

Faya the Nameless

The Prequel to the Fantasy Series «The Stairs of Eternity»

Pongü

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Copyright © 2019 by Isa Day and Pongu Text & Design Ltd., Meilen, Switzerland

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the author.

Cover Design: Isa Day

ISBN 978-3-906868-18-9 (ebook)
ISBN 978-3-906868-31-8 (print)

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Chapter 1

Faya trudged up the Stairs of Eternity, returning from yet another dangerous and unfamiliar past. The mission had gone well, but drained her.

Whenever she used the damned stairs to carry out the master’s incomprehensible orders, he kept her treasured assassin’s horse—Maysha—as a pawn that she didn’t disappear into times gone by, which resulted in a lot of running to cover distances.

It was out of the question to take another horse with her. No warrior rode into danger with an untested ally unless the situation was dire.

So, bodily exhaustion.

Not ideal if one had to travel up a steep and dimly lit circular staircase of indeterminate length.

On previous missions, Faya had tried to count the levels, adding one whenever she had completed a full turn of stone treads. After five journeys yielding wildly diverging results for the outward journey, the return leg, and the years covered, she had given up.

Going down took as long as it took, and so did going up.

Returning to the present from this mission seemed to take forever—and the stairs gave the nastiest impression she had experienced so far.

Their basic arrangement always remained the same, and at first glance they appeared no different from any circular staircase built into a narrow defense tower, even though the stone steps spiraled upward in a counterclockwise direction.

The distance between the central pillar and the outer wall, both constructed of coarsely chiseled rocks, measured about two steps. If Faya extended her arms, she could put her palms on both.

The similarities to an ordinary spiral staircase ended there.

At indeterminable intervals, doors in the outer wall opened like picture frames into the past. Some of them were narrow and constructed of plain wood, others bigger or smaller stone portals. The scenes they showed differed in the time of day, season, and setting, ranging from perfect peace to death and destruction.

From the start, Faya had taken care to hurry past without looking. Curiosity could be lethal, and the stairs always led her unfailingly to the door she had to take.

On one of her last journeys, however, she had come upon a massive portal of black stone that seemed to distort the rules of time and space. The door jambs, lintel, and threshold bore carvings of occult symbols and strange beasts, which seemed to dance in the light cast by the flanking pillars of torches. As if lured by a black spell, she had looked inside and glimpsed hell—which had since then become a popular setting for her frequent nightmares.

Today, the portal to hell was mercifully absent, but the scenes had vanished. Every portal, no matter if plain or ornate, gaped like a black hole ready to swallow her, and no torches burnt in the irregularly spaced wall sconces. Faya had to find her way in a dim grey glow of uncertain origin.

And then the mudflow!

On a good journey, the stairs were dry and somewhat dusty like any old and abandoned place. Worse manifestations included slippery dead leaves, lichen, and cobwebs as thick as curtains, or a cold humidity that chilled the traveler to the bones.

This annoying mixture of debris and sludge was new.

Within a few turns, the steps got so treacherous that Faya resorted to climbing on hands and feet.

While the bodily exertions of each mission took a severe toll, the mental strain had proven even worse.

Every time Faya entered the Stairs of Eternity, she stepped out of her timeline. Upon her return, she reentered at the exact moment she had left and without having aged a second, no matter if her mission had taken her days, weeks, or months. As a result, her experienced lifetime didn’t match those of her friends anymore, which wreaked havoc with her sanity.

In addition, the master’s orders for those special missions made little sense to her and rarely involved murder. Instead, Faya transported encrypted messages and ordinary items, or just observed something and reported back.

With relief, she spotted the first hints of a familiar orange glow seeping down to her. And there it was—the exit.

Faya crawled onto the stone step that marked the present. The door adjoining it was plain and looked like many others she had encountered on the journey up, but the faintest orange sheen highlighted its frame and behind it extended a dark, bottomless abyss.

She rose with a relieved sigh and made to step onto the abyss when her surroundings turned black and she bounced off something that felt like a huge sack of bones.

In falling, Faya drew her knives, somehow found her footing after having toppled down just a few steps, and faced her attacker with raised knives.

Her mind froze.

A cloaked figure blocked the door—a man from the sheer height of him. Faya could see sections of the gigantic cave outside to the left and right of his black hood. The rest of him sealed the doorframe like a hatch. He had pushed his hands into the opposite sleeves of his cloak.

This was intimidation at its best. He didn’t speak, nor move, but his stance left no doubt. He would not let her through.

Faya considered what to do. She was just a slip of a woman. Her friends sometimes likened her to a feral and half-starved black kitten. Nevertheless, she was one of the deadliest assassins of the guild, perhaps even the deadliest.

Thus, he was likely to underestimate her.

The problem was that his quiet most likely misled her to underestimate him. She didn’t think he was human. Around her, the stairs were back to their normal boring and dusty appearance. Had he wrought the change?

“I request a word with you, Faya the Nameless,” he unexpectedly spoke. His voice was deep and somewhat breathy—the voice of an old man.

Faya resheathed her daggers. She didn’t need them to kill, and they seemed of little use in this case. “Who asks?” she inquired.

“I will tell you in a moment, but first I want to show you something. I request your word that you will hear me out and not run until I bid you farewell.”

She scoffed. “The word of an assassin?”

He showed no reaction. So he knew.

“The word of a young woman who hates the man who enslaved her.”

“I promise,” Faya said.

“Then step out onto the abyss with me.” He unblocked the doorway, his movements too sleek for an old man, and waited outside.

Faya climbed the final steps and went to stand by his side. Up close, he was not as tall as expected. The top of her head reached his shoulder, which made him tall but not tall enough to stand out in a crowd.

As always when she stepped onto the abyss, her mind shut down and her stomach reacted. There was little magic left in the world, its vestiges evident in people or things that were not quite as they should be. But how much of this strangeness originated in magic and how much in treachery was often impossible to discern.

In such a world, a place like the abyss should not exist. They were standing in an immense rock cave on empty air over a chasm of black nothingness. High above them, grey, orange-tinted mist swirled, and behind them…

Faya looked over her shoulder.

In the center of the open space, the Stairs of Eternity hung in emptiness, slowly rotating. In the mist high above, translucent steps outlined by an orange glow took shape. Suspended from luminous, ethereal strings, they revolved down to the present where they petrified and disappeared into the abyss of the past.

“If you have questions, you may ask them,” the man offered.

“In my trade, you get killed for curiosity. And I have so many questions that I wouldn’t know where to start.

[…]

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