by Victor Milán
The bugbear tut-tutted and shook his head, making his bat ears wag. “Not one of them could be trusted not to spill soup all over that stunning gown, Zaranda, not a solitary one. You cannot conceive how hard it is to come by competent help these days. They’re all fearful of bandits—or eager to run off and become brigands themselves. The cook took off a fortnight ago, and the best replacement I’ve yet turned up scarce knows a garlic clove from a common thistle, so I’ve to oversee the cooking in addition to all my other chores.”
Father Pelletyr glanced up sharply, having found something even more alarming than the immediate presence of a monster in an apron. “Are we liable to attack here?”
The bugbear’s eyebrows crawled up its flat skull. “Good heavens, no, Father! This is Zaranda Star’s house. None would dare attack it, never knowing when she might return to avenge such a slight.” And he turned and went out with the empty tray.
“Not to mention the fact that the premises are guarded by a bugbear,” Farlorn murmured. “How did you manage that, Zaranda?”
“Gisbertus? Oh, he’s harmless. He’s been with me forever.” She attacked her soup with her customary appetite.
Seeing that no further explanations were forthcoming, Father Pelletyr picked up his own spoon. “How is it that you came to forswear the practice of magic, Zaranda?” he asked.
“The practice of magic?” She glanced up from her own spoon. “I never did, Father.”
“I realize that, child; I saw how you lit the fire, and I’ve seen you in action. Let me say, the study, then?”
She shrugged. “Too sedentary a life. I like being able to stretch my limbs betimes.”
“Few even attempt the transition from the way of the wand to the way of the sword.”
“It’s never been my ambition to be like anybody else, Father.”
Gisbertus came back, bearing small fowls baked in clay vessels. These he cracked open with deft strokes of a mallet, leaving neither shards nor dust, then served out the steaming birds.
“What are the tidings, Gisbertus,” Zaranda asked, “aside from the difficulties entailed in keeping a domestic staff?”
“Banditry on the rise, and the roads are nowhere safe. Your larger inland cities yet harbor dreams of conquest, but after the fall of Ithmong’s tyrant Gallowglass, they’ve grown quite circumspect. And from Zazesspur comes great talk of restoring the monarchy.”
Zaranda laughed. “I asked for fresh tidings, Gisbertus, not the same news as last time I visited, and the time before.”
The bugbear sniffed, tucked the serving tray beneath his furry arm, and rose to his full height, endangering the age-blackened timbers of the high ceiling. “The change winds are blowing, Zaranda, mark my words. From every street corner in Zazesspur, halflings preach redistribution of the wealth while the Earl Ravenak preaches the expulsion by force of all nonhumans from the land. Bands of darklings ravage the streets by night, fell creatures who spring from no-one-knows-where to sow terror and dismay.”
The bugbear hugged himself and shivered as if to a thrill of horror, eliciting wide-eyed glances of surprise from Farlorn and Pelletyr and, perhaps, the flicker of a smile from Stillhawk.
“The people cry out for a strong man, a Man on Horseback to bring order from chaos.”
Zaranda laughed and flared the nostrils of her aristocratic but somewhat skewed nose. “Such a man is like a shooting star: he may portend great fortune or may crash through your roof.” She picked up her fowl and tore at it with strong white teeth, and no great daintiness. “I’ve seen more roofs in need of mending than folk blessed with fortunes fallen from heaven,” she added, chewing thoughtfully.
“Nonetheless,” Gisbertus said huskily, “great things are expected from Baron Faneuil Hardisty. He himself seems one of those so blessed. Or so I hear it said. He’s the man, not just for Zazesspur, but for all Tethyr. Or so the travelers say.”
Zaranda put down her bird and gave him a look of surprise. “Oh, so? Such talk might have gotten a body torn asunder by a mob not so many years ago.”
“The change winds, Zaranda. They blow and blow.”
“Ah, well.” She shrugged and picked up her fowl again. “Air grows stale where no winds blow, as water grows stagnant where there’s no flow. Though I’ve no love for men on horseback, myself.”
The bugbear went out again.
“Your help is rather familiar,” Farlorn said.
“He’s pretty much all the family I have—save my comrades of the road.” She glanced at his plate. “You’re picking at your food. If you don’t want it, I’ll take it.”
Farlorn’s laugh sounded a trifle forced. “Oh, no you don’t, Zaranda. It’s just that the presence of such a fell creature throws off my appetite.”
“Very little throws off mine.”
“If Zaranda vouches for him,” said Father Pelletyr, biting off the end of a thighbone and sucking out the marrow, “that’s good enough for me. The gods have gifted her with sound judgment.”
“Well, sometimes,” Zaranda said.
“Besides,” the priest said, “good Stillhawk eats with fine appetite, and he’s suffered more at the hands of evil things than the rest of us combined.”
The meal ran to several more courses. Farlorn got over his momentary squeamishness and fell to as eagerly as the others. All four were famished after a long day on the road and the brief excitement at the halfling roadblock. Conversation dwindled, first because the serious business of eating took precedence and then because bellies filled with good food and wine from Ithmong, the fatigue of the trip across the Vilhon Reach—and the more vigorous preliminaries—began to lay hold of them, weighing down their eyelids as well as their tongues.
Stillhawk, who tried for Zaranda’s sake to ape the civilized courtesies to which he was unaccustomed, rose first from the table. She looked up at him and nodded.
“The night is warm and fair,” she said. “You’ll be sleeping outside?”
The ranger nodded. He had little use for feather beds, less for walls and roofs. “In the unlikely event it rains, there are empty stalls in the stable. If Goldie’s gambling with the grooms again, run them out. She cheats abominably, anyway.”
Stillhawk nodded again and withdrew.
“With your permission, fair lady,” Father Pelletyr said, stifling a yawn behind a pudgy hand, “I shall retire to my evening prayers as well.” Despite this announcement, he made no move to leave the table.
“My house is yours,” she said.
“What of you, Zaranda?” asked Farlorn, lounging with apparent artlessness in a chair of age-stained oak.
“I’m off to my tower, and then to bed.”
The half-elven bard pushed a laugh through his fine nostrils. “So that’s why you bought yourself a manor with a fine high keep.”
“In part,” she said, rising and smoothing her gown. It was a gesture of surprising femininity from one whose hands were callused from gripping a sword-hilt.
“I’ll never understand the fascination the tiny lights in the sky hold for you, Zaranda,” Farlorn said, shaking his head. “They’re lovely, aye, and suitable for illuminating lovers and inspiring song. But they’re no more than jewels set in a crystal sphere; all know this.”
“Perhaps,” said Zaranda, frowning slightly. Master of words as well as melodies, Farlorn seldom said anything without good reason, perhaps reasons in layers. The remark he tossed off about the stars illuminating lovers cut close; she’d been sleeping alone for a long time.
Once, long ago, Farlorn the Handsome had been Zaranda’s lover. Briefly. They had parted ways and not seen one another again for years. Then, when she was gathering up the risky expedition to Thay that preceded her current journey in the bustling Sembian port of Urmlaspyr, she had chanced to meet him again in an open-air market.
He professed himself willing to undertake an adventure or two. He seemed changed, not quite as ebullient, a shade more somber. But he was a master of stratagem and diplomacy; his jests and
songs and tales of wonder could do as much for morale on a long, hard trail as a thrown-open cask of gold; he had the elven stealth in his feet, and his fingers were as nimble wielding his sword and dagger as they were at plying the frets of his yarting. Perhaps the change was due to nothing more than age, though the years lay almost as lightly on him as his wild elf kinfolk—more lightly even than on Zaranda, who wore her winters well. In any event, she had invited him to join her company readily enough, and had already had several occasions to be glad of her choice. And still … and still, something about him troubled her.
“Perhaps she seeks to read her fortune in the stars,” said the father indulgently. In a mild sort of way, Ilmater disapproved of astrology. The common folk of Faerûn suspected it was one of those proscriptions laid down by the god so his servants could feel as if they held the moral high ground in dealing with weaker souls.
“No, Father,” Zaranda said. “I misdoubt, somehow, I’d be well served in knowing my future.”
The priest raised his eyebrows. “Why, child, most of humanity and demihumanity alike would pay most handsomely for an accurate augury of what the future holds in store.”
“Not Zaranda,” the bard said, smiling halfway. “She delights in differing from everybody else. Contrary is our Zaranda Star.”
She gave him a look. He had one leg, well-turned beneath her gown, thrown over an arm of the chair, and a golden goblet in his hand.
“I don’t believe we travel fixed, immutable paths, like oxen yoked to a grindstone,” she said. “And anyway no stars, whether jewels in crystal or the suns of distant worlds, control my destiny. That I do myself.”
Father Pelletyr shook his head almost mournfully. “Ah, Zaranda, what if everybody felt the way you do? We’d have chaos.”
Farlorn laughed, a sound like a golden bell tolling. Zaranda remembered, fugitive, how once that laugh could melt her heart. She wondered why it was no longer so.
“Chaos is Zaranda’s natural element, like water to an eel,” he said.
She looked at him again, carefully, as if by the force of her gaze she could ascertain whether his words held a hidden sting. But her long-abandoned studies had given her no magic for that. For his part, the bard was adept at hiding his true feelings behind an easy smile.
She wondered, briefly, if it still rankled him that she, not he, had terminated their affair.
She yawned, covered her mouth with a hand that was slim and graceful for all its strength. Such speculation added no gold to her coffers. That brand of blunt practicality would have made Father Pelletyr sigh for the state of her soul. But she was, after all, a merchant. The bottom line was that she was tired.
“I’m going to bed,” she said.
And she left them there, the stout priest gazing contemplatively into the candle flame and Farlorn staring into the depths of his goblet as if he caught a glimpse of his own future there, among the dregs of Zaranda’s wine.
Her own bedchamber nestled high in the tower, right beneath her top-level observatory. This served a multiplicity of purposes, not least of which was that if things went severely south in a hurry, she could defend her chambers single-handedly for quite a while. In Tethyr one couldn’t take for granted that such things wouldn’t happen. This fact accorded well with life as Zaranda had known it all along, so it caused her small discomfort.
“Good evening, Sorceress,” said the brazen head on her chest of drawers as she descended the steps—which had uncomfortably high risers, even for one possessed of her length of leg—from her observatory.
“Good evening, head,” she said. The breeze through the open but bar-crossed window was cool and sweet and carried the song of a night-bird in with it.
“You are troubled,” the head said.
She let the comment pass. The head was quite correct; it was a very perceptive brazen head. She was allowing herself to worry about money and, in particular, her lack of it. If she didn’t realize every farthing of the profit she anticipated from her current enterprise, she would at the least lose Morninggold. Her normal specific for such concerns was violent exercise, but the sheer exhaustion that hung on her shoulders like a leaden shroud precluded that.
Life was so much simpler when I was a mere warrior, with nothing to trouble myself over save whom I might next have to swing my sword against.… As soon as she thought it, she knew it was a lie, and faintly ridiculous; the way of the sword, whether as adventurer, mercenary, or even successful war leader against the nomad Tuigan, was far from carefree. Someone, possibly resident of another world, plane, or even time—Faerûn being uncommonly porous to artifacts, ideas, and even visitors from such places—had once described life as hours of boredom interspersed with moments of sheer terror.
That expressed it rather well. Yet she knew that wasn’t full truth either. The warrior’s life had its rewards. Battle was terrifying, but it was also exhilarating, filled with wild freedom and fury difficult to capture elsewhere. That was why Zaranda had not entirely forgone the sword when she made the latest change in her life and career—that and the fact that the world was, after all, a risky sort of place.
The truth, Zaranda, she told herself, is that you got bored with the life and decided to settle down. And look how that’s turned out.
“I can help,” the head intoned. Its eyes flashed a beguiling yellow.
Zaranda glanced at it in irritation. It was her preference to sleep unclothed, a fondness she found impractical to indulge on the trail amid an exclusively male contingent of caravan guards and muleteers, and she had been looking forward to that luxury tonight in her own bed in her own secure keep. Now it occurred to her that she was hardly prepared to disrobe with that thing staring unblinking at her from her chest of drawers, which was ornamented with grinning goblin heads carved in bold relief.
“Be silent,” she told the head, “or I’ll put you back in your chest.”
She had ordered the chests containing the truly powerful magic items conveyed to her chamber for security. Perhaps the rarest, most powerful, and most nearly priceless of all was the brazen head. The product of a mage whose bones had long decayed to dust and scattered on the winds a dragon’s age ago, before Elminster was more than a gleam in his father’s eye, the head was the bust of a man acerbly handsome, with a scholar’s brow and an ascetic’s narrow, bearded face. Unfortunately, it had also a satyr’s sensibilities, which was why Zaranda was going to be sleeping in her nightgown tonight.
Aside from lips and eyelids, which worked on cleverly crafted hinges, the head’s cast-bronze face was immobile. Nonetheless it managed to convey both injured innocence and invitation.
“You have been good to me,” it crooned. “Far more congenial than my previous masters for millennia—not to mention easier on the eyes. I would help you. I offer you secrets.”
“ ‘Secrets,’ ” Zaranda echoed in disgust. Statue it might have been, but the head was palpably alive, aware of self and surroundings. Zaranda had found herself unable to bear the thought of the thing riding in claustrophobic darkness for weeks without end, so she took it out discreetly whenever she could. And look where your soft heart gets you, she upbraided herself.
“Secrets,” the head repeated eagerly. “Secrets of the ancients. Secrets of sorcery long forgotten. The arts mantic, necromantic, or just plain romantic, if that’s what you prefer.”
“No,” Zaranda said. She sat at her dresser, unwound her hair from its braid, let it hang unbound down her back as she brushed it out.
“Come now,” the head said. “Any mage alive would kill to know such secrets as I hold within this bronze conk.”
“Not me.”
“You could gain great power.”
“Power doesn’t interest me.”
“Wealth beyond imagining.”
Zaranda grimaced. “At what cost?”
“I hardly expected to find such small-souled niggling within you, Zaranda Star. This merchant life has smirched your soul.”
“At least I still
have my soul.”
“I cannot help noticing,” the head said in gilded tones that reminded her uncomfortably—in several ways—of Farlorn, “that for a woman of such striking handsomeness you spend an uncommon percentage of your nights alone. All of them, in my limited observation—not to put too fine an edge upon it.”
She let that pass and brushed her hair with redoubled vigor.
“You could win the hearts of handsome princes.”
“I’ve done that,” she said tightly. She laid the brush down with exaggerated care to keep from smashing it against the dresser. “I’ve never needed magic, either. And princes aren’t worth the bother. Too full of themselves, expecting every whim to be instantly obeyed.”
“Ah, but with the lore I can impart, they would live only to obey your every whim.”
“If I wanted a pet,” she said, rising, “I’d buy a dog. Good night.”
The head tut-tutted. “Zaranda, Zaranda. Doesn’t your curiosity tempt you, most of all?”
She sat on the edge of her bed, which had four spiral-carved oaken posts upholding a fringed silk canopy. It was booty from a Tuigan hetman, who had himself looted it from Oghma-knew-where. It was rather ludicrous, but it secretly tickled Zaranda to have it.
“Yes,” she admitted. “For example, if you know such secrets of ultimate potency, why don’t the Red Wizards of Thay rule all Faerûn? They’re eager enough to do so.”
“Ahh,” the head said again. Had it an arm, Zaranda got the strong impression it would have laid one finger along its aquiline nose. “They were unworthy to wield such power. So I answered their queries in riddles until they grew tired of me and shut me up in a dusty, dreary warehouse.” It sighed. “The sacrifices I make to maintain the world’s balance.”
Zaranda sat regarding the head in the yellow candlelight. That was one of the legends that led her to Thay, whispers of a brazen head of immeasurable antiquity and knowledge, whose most recent possessors had been unable to wring any sense from it. Exasperated, they had left it on a shelf a hundred years or so and forgot about it. It had thus become available to anyone with sufficient enterprise, not to mention foolhardy courage. Along came Zaranda and her hardy band.
