by Victor Milán
Simonne’s dark eyes narrowed. “Be calm, my daughter,” murmured White Eyebrow. “This, too, shall pass.”
He glided forward. “How may I help you, young gentlemen?”
The huskier of the two, whose hair was dark, laughed nastily. “It speaks,” he said to his partner in mocking wonder. He put a hand against the old gnome’s chest and pushed him reeling back. His friend, who was skinny and dark blond, giggled shrilly through a prominent nose.
“You and your foul kind can leave this city, if you want to help me,” the husky boy said. “Nothing else will do, in fact.”
He picked up a vase glazed a deep, lustrous blue. Tiny flecks of light shimmered, seemingly deep within its slick surface: gold and white and blue and red. When the youth turned it this way and that in his unwashed hand, the points of light shifted as if they flowed within the very finish—or like the constellations in the sky when one turned one’s head.
“Now, my young friend,” White Eyebrow said, “that comes from a far world, on a vessel borne on wings of magic. If you care to hear, I’ll tell you of it—”
“I’m not your friend, rodent!” snarled the boy. “Magic! The source of all our problems, no?”
“Surely enough, Fredaro,” his companion said, bobbing his head. “Surely enough.”
“This reeks of magic,” Fredaro said. “What will please me is to make an end of it.” He raised it to the level of his brows and let it drop.
A slim but scarred hand caught the priceless vase before it struck the carpet-covered stone of the floor.
“Clumsy of you,” murmured Zaranda Star, replacing the object on its shelf with her right hand. “But then, as careless of your appearance as you are, it need not surprise us, I suppose.”
“Zaranda!” murmured White Eyebrow in alarm.
The boy’s face purpled. “Bitch! I’ll teach you to interfere.” He raised a beefy fist.
“Will you?” She smiled, then pressed forward with her left hand. Color gushed from the youth’s face as the tip of the poniard her hand held dug into his groin.
“I think not,” Zaranda continued in pleasantly conversational tone. “You’ll not even teach me disgust for those of your ilk; I learned that long ago.”
“Zaranda!” Simonne cried. The blond youth had snatched his cudgel, its head shod in gray iron. He lunged at Zaranda with weapon upraised.
With a slithering whisper like a metal snake on stone, Crackletongue slid from its sheath. Zaranda extended her arm so that the saber’s point found the notch of the youth’s collarbone. He braked abruptly to avoid spitting himself, then dropped his cudgel, fell to his knees, and began to weep and plead for his life.
“You’ll regret this,” hissed his burly friend.
She pressed the dagger harder. “I suspect all I’ll regret is not slaying you both. But that would distress my friend and spoil his fine rug, so I’ll refrain. As long as you leave us in peace.”
“You can’t threaten us!” the boy exclaimed through gritted teeth. “Lord Ravenak—”
“—Is a cur unfit to sniff at honest dogs that go upon four legs. You may tell him so, with the compliments of the Countess Morninggold. Up, now, and quit sniveling. It’s tiresome.” The latter was spoken to the blond youth, whom she urged up with Crackletongue’s tip beneath his chin.
“Zaranda,” White Eyebrow said hollowly, “you know not what you do. When you’re gone, they’ll just return, with more of their kind.”
“He’s right!” shrilled the blond youth, getting his courage back now that Zaranda had promised not to kill him. His nose was quite red. “We’ll fix you, you little monster! We’ll—”
“What’s your name, dung-blossom?” Zaranda inquired. The blond boy shut up and glared at her from red-rimmed eyes. She gouged the flesh beneath his chin. “Your name! You let slip that of Fredaro here, for which I’ll let him thank you in his own way and time. Now I’ll have yours.”
“I’ll say naught!”
“Oh, yes, you’ll speak. But if I have to put a compulsion on you, I’ll have you turning cartwheels naked down the street as well.”
“You lie! You’re a fighter, not a wizard!”
The lights in the shop blazed intolerably high, then all went out, plunging the room into darkness so abruptly it should have made a crashing sound. Then a single lantern flared out again from the wall above the youth’s ragged hair, casting rainbow-edged light through crystal facets.
“Your name?”
“G-Gonsalvo, my lady!”
“Attend me well, Fredaro and Gonsalvo, as if your lives depended on it, which they do. Should any harm befall this shop or its proprietor or his daughter or any customer arriving or departing, I shall hunt you down and cut your hearts out. On my soul I swear it. Now, begone.”
All the lights came back on. By the time the illumination had found its way back to all the crannies of the shop, the door was banging shut on its frame, and the bells were jingling.
“Zaranda, Zaranda,” White Eyebrow said, shaking his head. “Do you think all problems can be solved at swordpoint?”
“Not at all, old friend. Most of the problems life heaps on us are susceptible to no such solution, in fact. Yet some will answer to nothing else. It’s vital to learn to recognize them in such times as these.”
“If you stoop to violence, are you really any better than they?” the gnome asked.
“Yes,” Zaranda said. “If I do it to defend myself and those dear to me.”
She sheathed her cutlery and looked to Simonne, who said nothing, though her eyes blazed like lanterns, dark though they were.
“But I cannot always be here to help, as you and they both saw,” she said. “And that you must deal with as you see fit. I bid you good day.”
That night Zaranda’s sleep was tormented by dreams, and a whispering Voice.
She was not the only one to dream, nor to hear words spoken in those dreams. And unlike her, some heeded what was said.
Unseasonable overcast trailed tendrils down into Zazesspur like arms clad in dirty, wet wool sleeves. They brushed Zaranda’s face with clammy familiarity as she hustled along narrow Hostler Alley to her early morning appointment. The air was given added presence by the smells of last night’s grease, this morning’s breakfast, and fresh horse dung.
The buildings’ upper stories cantilevered over the already narrow alley so that they threatened to pinch off the dangling arms of cloud. This was a district given over to hostelries of the middle grade and lower and served the other needs of travelers: stables, provisioners, and taverns. There was also the inevitable water-fluid population of demimondaines, barkeeps, scullery maids, back-alley bones-rollers, charm-vendors, cutpurses, rogues, bards, alley-bashers, and joy-girls and -boys, few of whom could be found abroad at this hour. The visitor to Zazesspur must seek elsewhere for fixed places of entertainment.
There were theaters of various sorts in the Players’ Quarter, and gambling palaces and brothels in their own discreetly fortified precincts. There, well-paid sworders and the odd mage kept at bay the riffraff, whether jack-rollers and strong-armers, social activists who followed the brothers Hedgeblossom and Earl Ravenak, or even the individual city councilors’ uniformed goon squads. The very lowest ranks of such establishments were to be found in Bayside, the waterfront district, where the genuine riffraff held sway.
Tourists were at something of a premium these days. The harbor traffic, which was all that kept the city alive and reasonably prosperous, provided some custom for the inns, but nothing like what they had been accustomed to before the troubles began. Some hostelries had simply converted themselves into apartment blocks serving those displaced by the nomad invasions or the discord in the countryside, but it was still a buyers’ market for short-term accommodations. Which was how Zaranda was able to keep herself and her comrades quartered in reasonable comfort despite the state of her finances, which were eroding like an arroyo bank in a heavy rain.
Preoccupation and a poor night’
s sleep dragged Zaranda’s head forward and down from its customary proud carriage. As a result, she almost bumped into a man who came boiling out of a gate to her left. Or rather, smoking; he was trailing smoke and sparks from hair and clothing, and caterwauling like a man whose hair and clothes were on fire.
He pitched himself headfirst into a stone horse trough, raising a substantial hiss of steam and an even more substantial reek.
“What seems to be the problem?” Zaranda asked mildly as he reared up with algae hanging about his face and ears like green dreadlocks.
He pointed a dripping, still-steaming arm back through the gate into the stableyard. “Th-that witch,” he said, sputtering spray. “She put fire to me.”
Zaranda felt her brows knit in a frown. Her own experience told her “witch” usually referred to a female, and in no complimentary way. Best move along right now, the cautionary voice within her said. You’ve an appointment to keep, and this affair is none of yours.
She hitched her belt around to bring Crackletongue’s hilt more closely to hand. “What witch?” she asked.
Faces were beginning to poke out of windows. Some were sleep-blurred and reluctant, others open and awake, but all showed some degree of eagerness. This was a district of honest working folk who rose and set with the sun, as well as others who lived to different schedules, morally and chronologically, but Zazesspurians of all stripes relished little more than a good civic disturbance.
A small but brisk disturbance brewed in the stableyard. Angry voices muttered. There came thumps and foot-scuffles and a squall like an angry badger. Then into the alley came a knot of rough-hand laborers and stableboys, dragging with them what appeared to be an animated bundle of pale sticks and dirty burlap. The bundle was kicking and flailing and emitting the angry noise.
As they cleared the open gate, there was a sharp crack!, a fat blue spark, and a smell of ozone. At the same instant the whine resolved itself into “… let me go!” The bundle’s captors instantly obeyed, with yelps of dismay.
“What,” Zaranda asked mildly, “is going on?”
A gap-toothed stableboy wearing a badly stitched leather hood was waving his hands in the air as if to cool them. “The creature shocked us!”
The creature in question reached a thin, dirty hand to part tentacles of dirty red hair. An amber eye peered forth from a grimy, snub-nosed face. It took in Zaranda with a wild adolescent mix of defiance, hope, and fear.
“Why were you holding, um, her in the first place?” asked Zaranda, concluding mainly from intuition that the captive was female. She made her hand slide along her belt away from the saber’s hilt. She felt she had lost points yesterday by drawing blade on Earl Ravenak’s earnest young ravers. Surely she could handle a random handful of louts without recourse to arms. Particularly since this is no business of yours.
“She witched Zoltan!” another lout exclaimed. He was a pinch-faced lad with curly, dirty blond hair and soiled apron, who was waving a butter paddle with as much menace as such an implement could muster. Unlike most of the others, who wore the blue and green of the Hostlers & Stablehands Guild, he had a green and brown rag knotted about one skinny biceps, signifying his affiliation with the Taverners, Innkeepers, & Provisioners.
“She’s always up to tricks,” a third said. “She soured a pail of cream Luko was carrying to the buttery of Bustamante’s Excellent Hostelry.”
“I did not,” the redheaded girl said heatedly. She was even dirtier than her tormentors, Zaranda noted. “At, least, I don’t think I did.”
“Did too!” blond Luko declared, brandishing his paddle for emphasis. “And now she set Zoltan all aflame.”
“He didn’t look all aflame to me when he hit the horse trough,” Zaranda said. “More smoldering around the edges.”
“She made me get all tingly all over my body!” Zoltan announced. The way the slime-tendrils hung down over his ears and between his wildly rolling eyes made him resemble some kind of exotic and unsavory sea creature that had crawled up the pilings in the harbor. “Then my hair caught fire! And my clothes, too. I was burning up!”
Zaranda stared at him.
He dropped his eyes. “Well,” he said, “I was smoking pretty good. Feh.” He spat out muck.
“It’s time we paid her back for her tricks!” cried somebody from the back of the small mob. The others growled assent—an ugly sound, though without any perceptible move to put it into effect.
“What’s your name, girl?” Zaranda asked.
“Scab.”
“How attractive. Did you really do that to him?”
She nodded. “I woke up to find him pawing me as I slept in the s-s-straw!” The dam of her defiance burst, and her face flooded with tears.
Beyond her sobbing, the silence in the alley grew even thicker than the fog.
“No, child,” Zaranda Star said for what felt like the hundredth time. “I don’t need an apprentice. Besides, it’s not exactly healthy to be in my vicinity at the best of times, and these are far from that.”
Scab stuck out her underlip in a truly impressive pout. Zaranda said nothing. The girl produced a tremor in the projecting lip, and when that elicited no more response, a shine of moisture appeared in an eye visible between clumps of dirty hair.
They sat on the steps of what had once been a fine residence of green granite blocks, between a pair of stone guardian beasts that had long since weathered to couch-shaped lumps. The building had been converted to a carpet warehouse; the arched doorway at her back was bricked over. Zaranda had her long trouser-clad legs drawn up before her and her arms around her knees, and, still ignoring her companion, gazed off across the Carpet Mart.
The sun was high in the sky. The broad plaza, flagged in yellow sandstone worn to a shiny and treacherous polish by generations of feet, was dotted with the rug merchants’ kiosks, hung like flags with their colorful wares. Despite the troubles, buyers still flocked to Zazesspur from the north of Faerûn to purchase excellent Tethyrian wool carpets, as they did to buy the finely finished furniture and cabinetry for which Zaz itself was famous. Myratma was better known for other textiles; but Zazesspur was the place for rugs.
Of course, the buyers would go back home with lurid tales of having purchased their wares from camelback, from hawk-faced bearded men with flowing robes and headcloths, and would sell them as “Calimshite” rugs. In fact Calimshite silk rugs, though pretty, were inferior in craftsmanship and durability to Tethyrian wool carpets; the real gems of the great bazaar in Calimport were silken rugs from far Zakhara—wondrous indeed, if of the nonflying variety, since the Zakharans exported few of their magic carpets willingly. Still, to most of the folk of the Heartlands and farther north, all fine rugs from the South were Calimshite, and that was that, just as Amn and Tethyr were called Empires of the Sands, in spite of not having any sand to speak of. People are like that, and not just on Toril.
Still avoiding Scab’s piteous gaze, Zaranda sighed and stretched. It had been an eventful morning.
When Zaranda and her self-proclaimed charge arrived, a brief but vigorous skirmish had been in progress between some of Earl Ravenak’s bullyboys and a patrol of civic guard blue-and-bronzes armed with iron-shod cudgels, evidently bribed by the carpet merchants to take an interest in Hairhead doings, which they were notorious for overlooking. The square had subsequently hosted two outbreaks, a jostling, and a battle royal among the colorfully caparisoned retainers of the various city council members. The last of these, from which the rug merchants were just finished righting kiosks and dusting off rugs knocked sprawling by the festivities, had pitted the minions of Anakul the Just against the goons of Jinjivar the Sorcerer.
Anakul was something of an oddity: a professed devotee of evil who, though he wore the silver wrist-chains of Cyric, used as his personal symbol the black hand on red field of dead Bane. Even for Zazesspur in the years after the monarchy’s overthrow, it might seem a little much to have a man who was openly nostalgic for Bane on the ruling cou
ncil, but so obsessive was Anakul in his zeal for order and the rule of law that he was widely known as one of the most honest men in the city. It was said that he only cheated you if he had the full force of law on his side, justifying his only half-sardonic nickname. Of course, not even his passion for order prevented him from employing a robust corps of head-knockers. That was sheer survival.
Jinjivar the Sorcerer didn’t hire head-knockers, as far as anyone knew, though he paid claques to spread rumors in the streets about his magic prowess. The son of a Calim Desert chieftain and—again, he claimed—the pasha’s daughter by a concubine, Jinjivar had grown to adulthood among the nomads. He still maintained many contacts in his homeland, and though Tethyrians tended to disdain handiwork other than their own, had grown rich selling them magical and fanciful doodads for which their neighbors to the south were known, such as sand-clocks that turned themselves and brooms that swept of their own accord. Since his men wore blue and purple while Anakul’s livery was the black and red of Bane, the latter conflict had been particularly trying for Zaranda’s eyes.
The one thing Zaranda hadn’t seen was any sign of the one-armed man. You’ve done it this time, her internal voice chided. You stuck your nose where it didn’t belong and went saving the world again, and now you’ve lost your chance to regain your goods.
Scab emitted a sigh so gusty that she must have almost burst herself drawing in the air for it. “That’s it, then,” she announced in doom-filled tones. “If you won’t take me as your apprentice, I shall stop eating and starve myself to death. Quicker in the long run.”
Despite growing disappointment and desperation, Zaranda had to press her lips hard together to keep from smiling. “Come, now. Surely it’s not so bad as that.”
“Yes, it is. I’m an orphan. I have no home. I can’t work or sleep at the stable anymore, and no one will apprentice me. Death is all that remains.”
