Moondarkling: Elfboon
Sam Kabo Ashwell
fantasy SpeedIF Jacket 4 urban fantasy
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Moondarkling: Elfboon
A Rural Urban-Fantasy by Sam Kabo Ashwell

In terms of mere geography, Ruritania is landlocked. Liminally it's a lot more complicated. On slow days, this is the bank of the Svonat, a minor river that for maybe sixty kilometres traces the Slovakian border, only distinguished by rather sparse settlement for such a fertile valley.Today it's the verge of a mangrove swamp, water the colour of strong tea lapping gently against a barnacle-encrusted jetty, and far off through the trees the suggestion of blazing light on a foreign sea. (You haven't seen this one before.) A crab darts across a salt-crusted log; the air is warm, with a strong taste of salt, anchovies and rotting mud.

The Margin Cafe looks no more weatherbeaten than usual, and the prospect of cooler air is enticing.

A mudlark is perusing low-hanging branches for lootable fruits.
You look at the swamp
The water is the clear brownish hue of strong tea, and sparkles in little wavelets around the sprawling mangrove roots. It's only about waist-deep, though the mud beneath it is probably many times that. The sharp scent leaves no doubt that it's a salt-water day.
You examine the mudlark
Mudlarking is the mildly illegal[1] practice of loitering on water margins[2] in the hope of happening upon valuable salvage or harvest. By your estimation, gold-sands, pearl beds and sturgeon populations manifest a lot less often than crocodiles, spring tides or bilharzia; every now and then some idiot prospector convinces themselves that they have developed a System, but more usually it's the domain of the more enterprising variety of indigent.

This particular mudlark is youngish, scrawny and not conspicuously insane.
Note 1
And in Ruritania, tedious, complicated and socially bootless to prosecute. As far as you're concerned, the law exists as an alternative way of nailing the ones who branch out into smuggling or elfin traffic.
Inventory
You are carrying:
the Nook of Shadows.
semi-automatic
Note 3
It's only in the last couple of years that anyone started making automatic rounds jacketed in cold iron; formerly you had to lug around a gigantic revolver that made holes of undiplomatic proportions in everything and kicked like an onager with a hornet on its balls, and the Glock.
Examine nook
It's a sort of eldritch scrapbook of stuff that you've ripped off from people who ripped it off from a bewildering assortment of charlatans, Inquisitors, cat ladies, fantasists, perverts, aelfkultur-appropriators, cabalists, storytellers, alchemists, space cadets and paranoids. Stratified bullshit, deep and compacted and fertile, mounted up into a tell. Potent stuff.

Its first incarnation was an age-yellowed Penguin that was bloated with inserts and shedding pages before you were twenty, and you recently upgraded to a more portable version. The problem is that it's a Lithuanian knockoff with an OS designed in Tanzania. It features a Weirding Manager intended to suggest the most dramatically appropriate spells, but either dramatic conventions are very strange in Tanzania or the manager has attained a limited but cantankerous sentience, and rare is the occasion on which it supplies a spell of transparent utility. It can, at any rate, be used to access the police databases and look people up, even in places where liminality banjaxes conventional connections.
Go inside
The margins are not a stable place to live, but there are plenty of people passing through and they're all in need of something. This place supplies it: food, potable water, first aid, doss space, amateur legal counsel, trauma debriefing. Physically it's a low-ceilinged, broad, poorly-lit room, somewhere between bar, mess-hall and doss-house, with what would be a comfortable, homey scent if you liked fish soup, damp clothes and ill-washed foreigners[4].

Druse loiters decoratively behind the bar.

A particularly sorry-looking outclade[5], huddled over a bowl of Complimentary Soup, is the only customer.
Note 4
And actually, having come here almost every day for three years, you are disturbed to find that you kind of do.
Note 5
The Liminal Patrol does not make judgments act on behalf of the Outsider Office[6], and it is very important to use a term that remains agnostic on whether its referrent is an asylum-seeker, refugee of war, economic migrant, vagrant, smuggler, baby-snatcher or insurgent. It's best to just think of them as a shambling mound of paperwork.
Note 6
Who's in charge of the margin is kind of complicated. The Frontiers Division is nominally in charge of securing the borders, but here they just make flyovers and kick the crap out of anything that looks like a monster or an invasion. The Outsider Office processes such immigrants as make it into a queue at a provincial capital (or, just as often, a holding cell). The Liminal Patrol deals with everything that falls in between, which is to say the difficult stuff.
You look at Druse
Dweller in the perpetual legal shadow of the boundary and proprietor[7] of the Margin Cafe, Druse is dark-eyed, slender-limbed and fine-featured and has perfect hair that falls across his face in silver strands and okay let's not be fucking coy about it, he's a half-elf. Which is good for him as far as getting laid goes, but ugly as all hell for legal status. You strongly suspect that you're carrying his child, which is kind of troublesome territory because apart from the whole wrong-side-of-the-tracks deal elves have this cultural Thing about human babies, a little bulb goes on behind their eyes and the last time one of those bulbs went on (or someone thought they did) there were riots and half the Kobolykunst ghetto got burned down. You dealt with more of the aftermath than you care to remember, and you had to call in favours from the Pale Colony, and unforseen complications arose and now the fangy pillocks think you owe them[8].

However, all of this is going to be put off by angsty procrastination, implausible miscommunications and emotional immaturity until Volume La Troisieme of the Moondarkling Cycle, so at the moment he's just a distraction. Let's just pretend he's not here for now, all right? Like this.
You look around
The margins are not a stable place to live, but there are plenty of people passing through and they're all in need of something. This place supplies it: food, potable water, first aid, doss space, amateur legal counsel, trauma debriefing. Physically it's a low-ceilinged, broad, poorly-lit room, somewhere between bar, mess-hall and doss-house, with what would be a comfortable, homey scent if you liked fish soup, damp clothes and ill-washed foreigners.

A particularly sorry-looking outclade, huddled over a bowl of Complimentary Soup, is the only customer.
Note 7
By its nature, few of the Cafe's clientele have or even understand money; Druse is mostly paid in low-end elfboons. He hopes, or says that he hopes, to eventually accumulate enough boons to be able to go home, once the war's over; but boons don't stack in a neat numerical fashion, and you have only the vaguest idea as to whether this is a credible ambition.
Note 8
See Moondarkling Volume La Zeroiene: Witchlighten.
You examine Soup
Outclades can straggle in in any number and at all hours, including the numerous ones in which Druse doesn't want to cook; but they they're often cold and hungry. And freight orders don't make it out here very reliably. The solution is the Complimentary Soup, an oversized, eternally simmering crockpot containing a sort of high-class pigswill. It receives most of the fruits of Druse's sporadic hunter-gathering; on bad days the major ingredient is barnacles, and although its flavour evolves over the years it always retains a basic fishy character.
You eat Soup
You already ate. You try to make a point of it, if you plan to show up at a non-cooking hour. It's not that the Soup is invariably bad, but it's rarely very good and often outright awful, and there is no way to tell until you've swallowed the first spoonful.

(first taking the Complimentary Soup)
That's hardly portable.
You examine the outclade
Piercingly beautiful, even for an elf. Age indefinite; she doesn't move with the assured arrogance of a mature adult, but then she's probably had a deflating few days. Somewhat damp, muddy and scratched.

Various details -- left forearm scarified in triple spirals, a particular style of weaving spidersilk ribbons into braided hair, a really expensive bra -- identify her as a member of the Ae Cau Shar clade. You only know this because they test you on the entire freakin" Aelfosemiotica every couple of years; the Ae Cau Shar are not, to the best of your limited knowledge, very closely affected by the conflict. Kicker is, they only speak their own obscure language, and occasionally Middling Forkmouth, which works as something like a regional trade-jargon for elves but is fearsomely unlearnable for humans[9].
About you
Your Ruritanian passport calls you Zbyana Ostrava Kalinin-Zorndorf, and your parents call you something similar with different phonetics. The elves are notoriously sloppy about both paperwork and nomenclature, but a plurality of them would acknowledge you as Comtessa Radishes,  Starlight Through Frozen Waterfalls, Lord High Weatherstone of the Hollow Hill, and Dawn-cobwebs Musketeer[10].

Your outfit was constructed around a camel trenchcoat, an extremely French scarf, and the World's Stupidest Boots.[11]
Note 9
Which is suspiciously convenient for anybody who might have a motive to avoid the challenges of interrogation, hem-hem.[12]
Note 12
C.E.J. Pacian, Gun Mute, talking to.[13]
Note 13
Adam Thornton, Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis, opening screen. Believe it or not, I was abusing footnotes before I even fired Stiffy up, but the encouragement is appreciated.
Note 10
And several others that you're not allowed to disclose, one or two that you are literally incapable of disclosing, and a whole host that are best left unshared in polite company. Turning down elf-boon names is Not Done, but it would be a lot easier if they weren't such a bunch of pervs.
Note 11
By inclination you think about clothes perhaps four times a year, but elves have an intense cultural prejudice against anyone not ridiculously overdressed. Most patrollers default to something gothy and heroin-chic on the grounds that it can be sustained with little sleep and less laundry, but it's become such a staple of the patroller stereotype that you resisted. Fortunately, even the Ruritanian Liminal Patrol maintains a stylist on staff.
Sing
Your singing is abominable.

Well, shit. Now you have to work out what to do with her. There's no chance that she has a clade sponsor, because she doesn't have a clade. Which also means that she'd be outside even what passes for a social safety-net in the refugee camps. And if the Ae Cau Shar aren't actually in the war, asylum is going to be a whole lot harder to come by even if she gets to the head of the queue, which she won't. So your choices, essentially, are to arrest her and consign her to a muddy limbo for the rest of her natural life, or turn a blind eye, let her wander off into the countryside and get arrested by rural police instead, or stoned by a Landnat gang, or abducted. Or deport her, to whatever was scary enough to make all this seem worthwhile.
Arrest outclade
It's one hell of a rough deal, but she's probably headed in this direction anyway, and you can at least make the process more gentle than the provincial police are likely to. And it's not the Landnats.

It takes a while to convey the idea to her, but after some emphatic gestures at the door and tugging at the wrist she gets it, arches an impeccable eyebrow, and looks even more tired than before. You shepherd her to the nearest branch of the Outsider Office, stick around to make sure they don't fuck up the paperwork or mess her around, and leave her your card. Not that she understands phones.
Back at headquarters, you crunch out a  report. Krebs nods noncomittally over it, and it gets filed, and you go home. You stare
fixedly at the doormat for about ten minutes, and then you go about your life, not quite trying to forget, not quite trying to remember.
You kiss her
She's cute and everything, but that side of yourself goes mysteriously unmentioned until Volume La Soixieme: Shadowed Wings, and a good two-fifths of the fans still refuse to regard that as canon.
You shoot the outclade
I beg your pardon?
Inventory
You are carrying:
the Nook of Shadows.
semi-automatic
You exit
Today it's the verge of a mangrove swamp, water the colour of strong tea lapping gently against a barnacle-encrusted jetty, and far off through the trees the suggestion of blazing light on a foreign sea. Something rubbery rolls below the water's surface, then is gone; the air is warm, with a strong taste of salt, lemon zest and rotting mud.

The Margin Cafe looks no more weatherbeaten than usual, and the prospect of cooler air is enticing. Or you could just get out of here.

The mudlark is engaged in hunting what may very well be fleas, though around here you never know.
You go inside
The margins are not a stable place to live, but there are plenty of people passing through and they're all in need of something. This place supplies it: food, potable water, first aid, doss space, amateur legal counsel, trauma debriefing. Physically it's a low-ceilinged, broad, poorly-lit room, somewhere between bar, mess-hall and doss-house, with what would be a comfortable, homey scent if you liked fish soup, damp clothes and ill-washed foreigners.

A particularly sorry-looking outclade, huddled over a bowl of Complimentary Soup, is the only customer.
You look up the outclade in Nook
Unsurprisingly, she doesn't show up in any records. At all. Anywhere. Which makes sense: if she had crossed over before, she'd probably have done a better job of it this time.
You look up yourself in Nook
Whenever you try to egosearch yourself, the Nook of Shadows just plays back the vision you had in the final act of Moondarkling: Dancing Whispers that revealed you to be the sole descendant of the half-elfin heroine Joan of Arc and, therefore, destined to protect both humanity and elfkind through a vaguely-defined and ever-expanding array of powers and prophecies. There's a pointlessly ambiguous coda about the identity of your true love (also destined). It looks a lot less impressive in 2D.
You look up the mudlark in Nook
Using magic to obtain information about legal residents or legitimate visitors without a warrant or documented consent is horribly illegal throughout the EU, except under conditions of direct threat[14]. Even if you're just using the magic to remotely access Google. You could get in an awful lot of trouble doing this...
Note 14
You can scry for someone's psych records if they're waving a gun at you. You can't remotely view someone's home if you think they're building a bomb.