by Victor Milán
But gold bought her nothing. Bribed or not, the council’s lackeys could say nothing more than that she would have to wait for an administrative hearing. But the courts were busy. If a large enough donation to the council’s grand plan to remake Zazesspur were forthcoming, the process might be expedited, and a hearing held within, say, three months.
When Zaranda left the palace in disgust, the sun was already dropping into the harbor. She became aware of a sense of unease that had been stealing, unnoticed, upon her all the time she had spent within the palace.
She shook her head in something like annoyance. I’ve always dreaded dealing with bureaucrats, she reminded herself. How could I be other than nervous, with my fortune resting in their hands? I mustn’t let these cursed dreams get to me. On the spot she decided to go get drunk.
“Zaranda,” the adventurer declared, leaning forward to bathe her face in the fumes of a less-famous Tethyrian wine, “your problem is that you’re lowering yourself by playing at merchant.”
Zaranda carefully set her own goblet of local red wine—of a somewhat more reputable vintage—carefully down upon the knife-gouged tabletop before her. She had come to the Smiling Centaur with Stillhawk, Father Pelletyr, Shield, and Farlorn, intending to drown her troubles in wine, a course of action that did little good. Now this scabrous mercenary was interfering with the process, and she didn’t know whether to be angry or grateful.
“Oh, so, Valides?” she said neutrally.
The mercenary nodded with the exaggerated emphasis of the drunken. “Certainly so. How else could it be?” He belched and wiped the back of his mouth with a hand no cleaner but drier. “Look at yourself, Zaranda. You used to be a warrior.”
“I still am.”
He waved a black-nailed hand, slopping wine from the leather jack over a much-spotted sleeve. “Now these merchants, you take them; they’re just bloodsuckers. No better than vampires, I’m bound, even if their color’s better.”
He laughed uproariously, and moistly, at his own jape. After a while he noticed that his audience wasn’t laughing with him. He quieted and leaned forward again.
“Merchants make nothing. They delve not, neither do they spin. But they rake off fat profits, yes they do! And for what? For nothing.”
“For taking the effort and the risks in conveying goods to those who wouldn’t otherwise see them,” Zaranda said.
A hand wave. “Nothing, as I said. Now you take the warrior, though—there’s a life that’s honest and clean.”
“You kill monsters and you take their gold.”
“That’s right! Yours is the right of the sword. You take what you will! By the sword!” He slammed his fist down upon the table. “That’s the way for a man to live! And, uh, a woman like yourself, too, Zaranda. Not as some money-grabbing merchant.”
Anger flared behind Zaranda’s eyes. She felt her cheeks grow taut and hot. No, she told herself, you’ve always held that any being had the right to speak freely. You’d cut a poor figure if that went by the wayside whenever someone spoke against your liking.
She forced her hand away from the hilt of Crackletongue and smiled a grim smile.
Valides had become distracted by discovery that his jack was running dry, and he turned around to bellow for a serving wench. Zaranda scanned the tavern.
The Smiling Centaur was little different from any tavern one would encounter from the Sword Coast to the Vilhon Reach: a broad common room with low smoked rafters and tables and chairs of inexpensive but solid make to resist use by customers of greater than human size or strength, and misuse during bar fights. The place was lit fitfully by candles placed on wagon wheels hung by chains from the ceiling, and by oil lamps in stout, cagelike wrought-iron sconces on the whitewashed walls. An ox-roasting hearth gaped like a monster maw in one wall, but it was cold and dark; the evening was cool to the edge of crispness, but the day’s residual heat and the warmth of bodies left no room for a fire.
It was crowded, but to her experienced eye, less than she might have expected on such a fine spring evening after a southern day more than amply hot to put an edge on one’s thirst. The noise level was lower, too, as if the revelry were somehow subdued. Even the clean-shaven face of proprietor Berdak, the centaur who gave the place its name, seemed to be smiling less broadly than usual as he washed brass flagons behind the bar.
Now and then Zaranda caught a muttered reference to darklings, accompanied by nervous looks around, as if the night-stalking horrors might be lurking beneath tables nearby. As far as gossip informed her, the things posed small threat to those who went abroad in armed parties, which was not unusual for most of the Centaur’s patrons. She thought there must be more to the almost furtive mood, the hollow, sunken eyes around her.
Or perhaps it was all Zaranda’s imagination, energized by her own nightmare-induced lack of sleep and the day’s events. But she had not survived such a hazardous life by taking aught for granted. She made a quick, careful survey of the immediate surroundings, reassuring herself that no one was taking undue interest in her or her four companions.
A serving maid appeared at the table, a young gnome with rather prominent pointed ears and a harried but pretty face that tapered from wide cheekbones to an almost elfin pointed chin. Valides snarled his demand for more wine like a curse, and when the gnome woman’s hip accidentally brushed the table as she turned, he raised a fist to strike her.
Zaranda’s hand caught him by the wrist, so quickly that it simply seemed to be there. He tried to pull away and turned a red-eyed glare to her when he could not. The serving girl scampered off.
Zaranda Star was one of those rare women who gave away comparatively little to men in the density of muscles, and thus power. The mercenary could have overmatched her strength to strength, with effort. The look in her eyes, now an almost self-luminous pale blue, and the name she had carved for herself with the curve-bladed sword at her side dissuaded him from expending the effort.
“Rest easy, man,” she said. “What’s got into you?”
He dropped his eyes, and she let him wrest his hand free. “These gnomes,” he spat. “They infest the city like worms in cheese. Arrogant, clannish little beasts! They’ve long conspired to do honest human folk out of first their wages and then their jobs. But mark my words—Earl Ravenak knows what they’re about. And he has the cure for their scheming.”
“Ravenak?” Zaranda spat the word out like a shred of spoiled food.
Valides nodded, looking owlish. “The man with the plan; he knows what to do about all these outland scum, these refugee hordes and this inhuman vermin.”
Valides was himself no native Tethyrian, but he plowed on before Zaranda had a chance to point that out. “We’ll see a change when this Baron Hardisty comes to power,” he declared. “Right now he claims to disdain Ravenak, to assuage the hoity-toity who lack the stomach for doing what must be done, if you get my drift. But mark my words—there’s steel beneath that lace and frippery! This Hardisty has steel where he needs it. He’ll back the Earl when the time comes.”
“The baron may have steel where he needs it, but he’s got muck in his brainpan if he has aught to do with that green slime Ravenak,” Zaranda said. “Even in Tethyr it’s a wonder he’s not been hanged, noble or not.”
Valides’s drunk face began to cloud over.
“Now, Zaranda,” Father Pelletyr said. He sat at Zaranda’s left, where he had been occupied addressing himself to a leg of mutton. Restored, he took an interest in the conversation. “Your friend is entitled to his opinions.”
“And I to mine,” Zaranda said, leaning against the back of her chair and crossing her arms. The serving maid came back and set a fresh-filled jack before the mercenary. He glowered from her to Zaranda, cast a handful of coppers to her. She scooped up the empty vessel and scuttled away.
Valides swilled deeply, then glared about him. His eye fell upon a bulky figure stacked in the corner behind Zaranda, swaddled head to toe in a cloak. It was Shield of Inno
cence. Zazesspur was basically a tolerant town, though Valides’s talk made Zaranda wonder what it was coming to, but there were few places in Faerûn in which an orog warrior would be made welcome. The Smiling Centaur attracted a lot of demihuman custom, and patrons of all races largely forbore to inquire into their fellows’ antecedents, in the interest of avoiding scrutiny of their own. Zaranda had hoped he would attract less attention here than out on the street.
But Valides, though Zaranda’s sometime comrade-in-arms, was one of those types with a gift for doing the least welcome thing. “What have we here?” he asked, heaving his somewhat squat form up from his stool and lurching toward the silent cowled figure.
Stillhawk stood up, too. With the closeness and clamor threatening to overwhelm his wilderness-honed senses, he would take neither wine nor spirit, and had been sitting quietly by Shield with a flagon of water and a platter of beef. Even here in the south, few would dare chafe a ranger of the Dales for abstaining from strong drink; it wasn’t the sort of behavior one got a chance to repeat.
Though he hated and mistrusted the great orc, Stillhawk kept watch over him as a service to Zaranda. He moved to bar the inebriated mercenary’s way.
But Farlorn Half-Elven reached out and caught his oak-hard forearm, staying him. “Bide, my friend,” he said in his silken baritone. “Our comrade merely wishes words with our silent one. Wouldst offend a warrior true?”
Stillhawk blinked; Farlorn’s words had a way of confusing him. Valides shouldered past him. “Hey, there, fellow,” he rasped at Shield. “What breed are you? You’re a big one—is it giant blood runs in your veins, or ogre?”
He put back his head and laughed uproariously at his own wit. Zaranda was standing now. “Vander,” she said softly, using the ranger’s rarely heard given name for emphasis.
The ranger nodded, turned. But now Farlorn stood between him and Valides. The bard’s moods were like a pendulum, though without the predictability; from this morning’s near-giddiness, he had swung into black despair. Unlike the others—Father Pelletyr’s thirst was far less exigent than his hunger, though over the whole course of the evening he might acquire a pleasant illumination—Farlorn had drunk with single-minded concentration, fury almost, since arriving at the tavern. His exotically handsome face was flushed, and his eyes were red. He was laughing, but his laugh had a jagged, nasty edge, like a Shadow Thief’s stiletto.
“What’s the matter with you, fellow?” Valides demanded. “Too good to drink with us normal-sized folk? Show us your misshapen face, then, you great uppity oaf!”
He reached for the cowl of Shield’s cloak. Zaranda prepared a spell that would, she hoped, douse all lights in the tavern, and for safety’s sake tossed back her own cloak to clear Crackletongue. For all his elf-trained quickness, Stillhawk could not get past Farlorn in time to stop the drunken mercenary, and once Shield’s tusked orc face was revealed, there would be a riot. And as ever, if blood must flow, Zaranda intended to be the spiller, not the spillee.
“Sweet Ilmater!” The tavern din had fallen low with anticipation. The choked outcry cut across the pregnant stillness like a full-throated scream.
Father Pelletyr had lurched upward from his chair. His face was suffused with blood and contorted as with agony. “My arm!” he gasped, clutching his bosom. “My chest! The pain—”
He collapsed, upsetting the chair he had occupied. His flailing hand struck his flagon, and the wine stained his white robe like blood. Zaranda leapt toward him but could not catch him before he struck the rush-covered floor.
In a flash, Berdak was kneeling by the stricken man’s side. Small for a centaur, the publican was solidly built, and with four legs for traction he cut through the mob like an Amnian racing dromond. He knelt beside the cleric and reached to feel his throat.
Then he looked up and shook his head. “His heart has given out,” he said. “This man is dead.”
“We know the face of our enemy,” a voice echoed down the darkened streets of Zazesspur’s Wainwright District, “and we shall grind it beneath our bootheels!”
A many-throated growl of approval answered him. Zaranda scowled and forced her hand away from Crackletongue’s hilt. “What’s that noise?”
Stillhawk stood at the corner ahead. He gestured right, toward the center of town. It comes from this direction.
She stalked forward and peered around the hip of a brick wall surrounding a wagonmaker’s yard. Several blocks away a forest of torches upheld by a multitude of hands illuminated a mob below and a man above, standing on the pedestal of an equestrian statue that had somehow escaped the iconoclastic fervor of the Troubles, in the midst of a square. Even at this range the mob members looked shaggy and unkempt, and a questing breeze brought a whiff of stale clothing and unwashed flesh to Zaranda’s nostrils.
“What is this?” she asked.
The four bravos she had hired from the tavern to convey poor Father Pelletyr’s body, wrapped in a piece of canvas, to the chapter house of his sect took advantage of the pause to lower their burden—gently, with Shield of Innocence’s still-cowled bulk looming over them—to the paving stones. One of them wiped his forehead of sweat with the back of his hand.
“From the sound of it, that’s Earl Ravenak addressing his hairheads,” he said. “This is thirsty work, milady.”
Farlorn unclipped a canteen from his belt and tossed it to the man. The man uncapped it, swigged, cast a reproachful look at the half-elf. “Water?” he asked plaintively.
The cleric’s death had dropped the bard into a stony-sullen depression. He gave the man a look. The body-bearer hurriedly drank. Zaranda had scrupulously avoided bringing wine along, and made sure her hirelings hadn’t. She didn’t want them growing antic with poor Father Pelletyr.
“What’s wrong with his followers?” Zaranda said. “They look like a passel of Uthgardt Beast Cultists coming off a half-moon binge. And smell worse.”
A second bearer drank and passed the bottle on. “Hairheads,” he said. “Ravenak’s followers. They’ve vowed never to cut their hair nor wash until all foreign elements are purged from Zazesspur.”
“Gnomish blood shall spurt under the knife!” the mad earl’s voice raved, magnified by a speaking-tube. The crowd howled like banshees at a chariot race.
“May the black galleys carry off the lot of ’em,” muttered the first man.
“Black galleys?” Zaranda asked.
“Zhentarim slave ships,” the bearer said, then spat again, more lustily still. “They ply the harbor by night. I hear they put in at docks down in the catacombs beneath the city, to carry kidnapped children away into slavery.”
“Mush-head,” the third bearer said. “You believe anything you hear.”
“It’s true, may the sahuagin eat your guts! My Uncle Alvo saw them his own self.”
“And what was your Uncle Alvo doing in the catacombs of a midnight?” inquired the fourth bearer.
The first man studied his sandaled toes. “Well … he fell down a manhole. He’d had a bit to drink, all right? He’s still as truthful a man as ever drew a breath of Zazesspurian air.”
“Which means he’s a liar approved,” the second man said. The other two hooted laughter.
“Come on,” Zaranda said, “before the Zhentarim dogs carry us all away.” The bearers stooped to grab the corners of Pelletyr’s winding sheet again. As they hoisted him to their shoulders with a soft grunt, it occurred to her she didn’t know exactly who it was the bearer wished the black galleys to carry off: Ravenak and his fanatics—or the “foreigners” they inveighed against.
What’s happening in Zazesspur? she wondered.
“My baby!” the woman wailed in a voice shorn of hope. “Give me my baby!”
The shuttered windows and blank-faced buildings around caught her words and tossed them, mocking, back at her. The short, twisted creature who had wrested her infant daughter from her showed her a smile full of teeth filed to points. The woman screamed and fought against the hands tha
t gripped her arms, but it was fruitless.
She knew she should not have been abroad on the streets by night, but she had no choice. Her husband had been dead four months, innocent victim of a street fight between members of rival political factions. Since then, she had worked at a lamp-seller’s stall in the Old Market to feed her infant. The merchant did not roll up his rug and bring in his wares until the sun sank into the harbor, and she had to finish sweeping up before she could go collect her child from her sister’s house. Then she faced a long walk home through darkened, near-deserted streets. But she had always preferred the chance of an encounter with darklings to the certainty of slow starvation.
Until tonight. She had been within three blocks of the collapsing tenement where she rented a closet-sized room, and her steps had begun to quicken with the nearness of home, such as it was. Between that and trying to soothe her baby, who had awakened and begun to cry, the first she had known of her peril was when she fetched up against the broad, leather-armored chest of a vast being with a face as much beast as man.
By then she was surrounded.
The grinning horror examined her baby with apparent curiosity, as if unsure what it was. “Please,” the woman begged, “don’t hurt her. Don’t hurt my baby!”
The thing looked at the child, shrugged, and tossed it to a snouted being about her own size. She had never seen such a creature before, but from the stories her grandmother had told her when she was young, she thought with sick terror that it must be an orc.
The orc caught the infant, held it up to peer at it in the cold, impersonal light of the stars overhead. The baby struck out with tiny fists and squalled. The orc tipped back its head, opened wide-tusked jaws to bite …
With a sound like a huge insect being stepped on, two handspans of curved sword tip jutted abruptly from its breast. Its caw of agony was drowned by a sizzling crackle as white sparks cascaded from the blade.
