by Victor Milán
She now traded banter freely with Goldie, though the mare admitted privately to spotting the girl points in order to encourage her. Goldie had also taught her to ride. Otherwise, Chen was still pretty oblivious to those people who did not actively engage her interest: Stillhawk, Shield, the boys—and men—who increasingly sought to catch her dark maroon eye. However, if still not a diplomat, Chen had learned at least a modicum of manners, and while Zaranda herself had little use for altruism, she had guided the girl to a point where she was no longer self-absorbed to the point of being a menace to navigation.
Chen had also begun to take some trouble with herself. She kept herself scrupulously clean now without Zaranda having to remind her. And she seemed to have gotten past believing anything she could wrap or hang around her was suitable garb.
Tonight, for example, she was quite handsomely turned out, in white linen blouse with deerskin lacings up the front. Just like the one Zaranda wore. She had on form-fitting dark blue breeches and soft boots with fringed, downturned tops. Just like Zaranda’s. Her heavy hair swept out behind her head like a dark red comet tail, confined by a silver fillet … just as Zaranda’s straighter dark hair was.
Clearly, a problem existed.
Chen pointed heavenward, where the few lazy-drifting slate clouds weren’t bothering to obscure many stars. “What’s that group of stars there called? Like an hourglass, sort of, with three bright stars across the middle?”
“Kind of a lopsided hourglass—but as it happens, that’s what they call it down here in the Empires of the Sands. In the north it’s the Huntsman, to the Tuigan the Horse-Bowman.”
Chen gave her a skeptical look. “That’s about the tenth constellation you’ve told me the Tuigan have named after something to do with horses,” she said in that very prim way she had when she thought she was being made fun of.
Zaranda laughed and hugged her. There was a time when such a suspicion would have brought on a concentration of uncontrolled dweomer to lift the hairs at Zaranda’s nape. Sometimes she dared hope she might actually civilize the girl.
“Honey,” she said, “to the Tuigan, everything has to do with horses. Most of their constellations are named for them, and those that aren’t have names from the hunt or war: the Hare, the Falcon, the Yataghan. But mostly, it’s horses, horses, horses. Did you know that one major tribal group has an epic poem a quarter of a million lines long about a hero whose horse is smarter than he is?”
Chen’s underlip jutted, most fetchingly. Zaranda felt the faint tingle of power in the air around them. “Now you’re teasing me!”
“No. Really I’m not. The Tuigan have some strange and wild ways—wonderful ways, I can see now that they’re out of our hair. They’re very different from us.”
“Oh.” Interest fell like a veil from the girl’s face. When talk turned to people, she quickly grew bored. Instead she pointed again to the sky. “How about that star away up there, that big red one?”
Zaranda smiled. Was the girl genuinely interested, or merely trying to emulate her in yet another way?
But the air was warm and sweet, the stars seductive in their brilliance. Chen could not be called a sweet child, yet she did lack malice. Her mind was quick and keen, and now that the soot had been rubbed away from the outside of her, her spirit shone clear and bright as any star. In her way she adored Zaranda, and Zaranda, in her way, loved her.
So they walked and talked beside the wide, complacent river, and left unpleasant necessities to the province of a different day.
Through lengthening shadows Zaranda walked back to the Ith-Side Inn with long-legged strides. Nothing had been decided in the day’s negotiations with the town council—but, of course, nothing was intended to be. That was the way of negotiations, that they dragged on, and while that fact was little to Zaranda’s taste, it was nonetheless a fact, and she could as readily draw the moon down from the sky as alter it. Striding the brick walkway that ran alongside the river and was flanked by weeping willows, she was not displeased with the talk’s progress, such as it was.
The Ithmong council would come around to her way of thinking, she was confident. Right now they had trouble seeing past the short-term pain of losing the income tolls brought. However, they and all Ithmong stood to gain from increasing trade—had already profited from the new commerce Star Protective Services had helped set flowing. Cutting Ernest Gallowglass’s tolls for the Ithal Bridge and river passage would serve the economy of Tethyr like a healing spell cast on a wounded warrior.
Of course, the town council would not be unique in the history of Faerûn if they attempted to have it all—tariffs and expanded trade—through a little well-timed treachery. Zaranda seemed to invite such a ploy by leaving most of her retinue, including senior partners, camped outside the city.
She was not quite so ingenuous. The two hundred Star Protective employees without the walls were recruited from the very best trainees who had passed through the program—smart, brave, and idealistic, devoted to Zaranda Star and to Shield of Innocence, who served as captain in Zaranda’s absence. While they were too few to storm the walls if the council got up to mischief, they were more than capable of rousing the countryside—where Gallowglass’s legacy ran to abiding distrust for all who dwelt behind Ithmong’s high stone walls—and shutting off trade. After all, grain and livestock didn’t have to be gathered inside the city before being shipped to the rest of Tethyr.
Zaranda began to whistle. She thought the town council got the point.
Life wore a far more cheerful face than when she had fled Zazesspur. Star Protective Services had extended operations across much of Tethyr. Zaranda drew sufficient salary to meet payments on her county in the east. She was herself an employee now, having quit as leader in a dispute last fall over what direction the company should take. To get her back, the others had been compelled to offer a contract making explicit her powers and duties as chief executive.
The possibility had existed that they would not so offer. But she had found attempting to be everything to everybody increasingly intolerable. Had they made no effort to win her back, she would have mounted Goldie—with Chenowyn behind her, if the girl still cared to be her apprentice—and ridden away. She loved Morninggold, but if she had to, she could put it behind her and start again anew. She had done as much before.
Of her comrades, Stillhawk remained mistrustful of Shield, though he was with him now, outside the urban confinement he so hated. After Zaranda walked and was hired back, Balmeric had quit, declaring the enterprise far too strange for him. He let Zaranda buy him out and rode to Myratma, and there, he said, he would take ship for Waterdeep, where a man could still find straightforward sword-swinging employment.
Chenowyn remained with Zaranda, of course. And Farlorn … Farlorn was where he happened to be at any given moment. He was like a cat, the beautiful half-elf bard. What she expected of him, even what she wanted of him, Zaranda could not have said.
The inn’s courtyard was surrounded by an eight-foot wall topped with broken glass. Attack from the river was reckoned no major threat; Ithmong had always had a respectably sized and reasonably professional town guard, which Gallowglass’s administration had only strengthened, and its riverine patrol kept careful watch for would-be marauders as a byproduct of enforcing the tolls. Thieves, however, were as intrinsic to urban Tethyrian life as houseflies, and found the river a convenient avenue, patrols notwithstanding.
Approaching the courtyard gate, Zaranda heard a familiar female voice crying, “Hah! Hah!” and the ring of steel on steel.
Frowning, she grabbed Crackletongue’s scabbard to keep it from fouling her leg and broke into a run. Zazesspur’s city council had issued several decrees officially deploring the activities of Star Protective Services, but had never quite mustered the presumption to try to outlaw it. Though the civic guard grew apace—with the aim, some said, of reuniting Tethyr by force—the council was currently preoccupied by a complicated gavotte preparatory to naming Baron
Hardisty lord of the city. An attempt to arrest Zaranda and her lieutenants—or, less formally, assassinate them—was not outside possibility’s realm, however.
She rounded the corner and stopped. Two figures faced each other, one slender and feminine, one scarcely less slim but taller and broader through the shoulders. Each wore quilted, heavily padded jerkins, leather gloves, and masks of wire mesh, and fought each other with capped rapiers. Stablehands lounged on the sidelines, uttering calls of encouragement.
As Zaranda appeared in the gateway, the fencers stopped and swept the masks from their heads. The master was Farlorn, his pupil, Chenowyn.
The girl’s cheeks were flushed beneath her freckles. “Oh, Zaranda, it’s so marvelous! He’s teaching me—”
She saw Zaranda’s expression. Her words faltered to a stop. “What do you think you’re doing?” Zaranda asked quietly.
Chenowyn gazed down at her feet, which were kicking at a clump of matted straw. “Learning to fence.”
Zaranda walked to her, touched her arm, guided her aside. The stablehands abruptly found business that wanted tending to. Farlorn stood with rapier tip grounded and protective mask under one arm, a faint supercilious smile on his face.
“Don’t you understand,” Zaranda asked in a quiet but pressing voice, “that you haven’t time for that? If you want to be a mage, you’ve got to work at it full-time.”
A full underlip trembled, then, “You didn’t have to! You’re a mage and a warrior, both! I just want to be like you.”
“Chen, dear, you don’t understand. I did have to devote myself to studying magic, body and soul. It didn’t come easy for me—it doesn’t come easy to anyone who really wants to be good at it. I didn’t become a warrior until I had studied magic for many years—and only after I’d put that study aside for good and all.”
Chenowyn sniffled, dabbed at an eye with her thumb, and looked away. “But that’s not the real problem,” Zaranda said. “The real problem is … you’ve got to stop trying to be me. Because you can’t be me, you cannot be more than an imitation me, and a poor one at that—however hard you try. Whereas the Chen I know is strong and vibrant and alive, an altogether admirable girl—and you do a marvelous job of being her.”
She touched Chen’s cheek. The girl pulled away.
“You’re just jealous because Farlorn is spending so much time with me!” she cried through tears. She ran off toward the stables.
Zaranda sighed and shook her head. And how much truth is there in that? she wondered.
A commotion came from inside the stalls. Chen burst forth, clinging like a monkey to the back of a handsome chestnut gelding. She rode right out of the yard and away up the brick street, grooms shouting angrily after her.
“I’ll bring her back,” Farlorn called. He loped gracefully into the stable, plucking the cap from his rapier and sheathing it. Zaranda teetered on the edge of following him.
The bard emerged on his dappled gray mare. He waved jauntily to Zaranda and rode in pursuit of her errant apprentice.
No, Zaranda thought. It won’t help if I go. Instead she went inside the stable on feet that had turned to lead, to greet Goldie before taking herself to her chamber.
As Zaranda arrived, the serving maid was leaving, having just lit the lanterns. Zaranda smiled mechanically at her, went into her chamber, pulled off her boots, and sat down at a table by the window.
The shutters were open, admitting evening smells of water and spring flowers and pavement slowly giving up the day’s heat. The lights were coming on all over Ithmong, and out on the river lanterns bobbed from barge prows like the lures of giant anglerfish.
The town council had sent wine, sprays of flowers, and baskets of preserved fruit—cheap enough gestures of goodwill. And indeed Zaranda appreciated them, though she wasn’t about to roll over on their account. She took up a wedge of orange preserved in ginger, bit into it, and noticed something new: a purple glass flask with stout body and long, slim neck.
Zaranda picked it up and turned it over in her hands, impressed. This was no local product like the rather insipid wine—Ithmong produced several serviceable beers, but their vineyards couldn’t hold a candle to Zazesspur’s. This was Tintoram’s Select, a blackberry brandy made by the halflings of the Purple Hills of the coast between Zazesspur and Myratma, famed throughout Faerûn for its flavor and potency. A notable gift, even for a town councilor who had been fattening on tolls the last few years.
She broke the lead seal and uncorked the flask. The aroma that flowed out was sweet and heady as first love and nourishing as a meal. She poured some—just a splash—into a tumbler. It was a purple so dark it was almost black. She passed it beneath her nose, allowing its richness to permeate her being, and sipped. It burned, and soothed, and burst like a bomb within her.
She let herself savor the sensations for a moment. Then she reached for her inkpot, her pen made from a sahuagin spine with steel nib from Kara-Tur, and a clean sheet of papyrus. It was time to begin drafting a contract proposal.
She wrote a little. Then, feeling the weariness of the day’s events clamp a heavy hand on the back of her neck, she picked up the tumbler, sipped again, rolled the brandy around in her mouth.
I wonder where Chen and Farlorn are, she thought, feeling concern stir. Yet she could muster no great urgency. Nor could she readily drag her attention back to the lines on the papyrus sheet.
Instead her attention wandered out the window. Away in the distance, over the river perhaps, a single amber light burned. It seemed both poignantly lonely and jewel-beautiful, and Zaranda found herself staring at it. As she stared, her vision wandered further and further out of focus, and the amber light grew steadily larger and fuzzier, until it became huge, became a sun, and swallowed her altogether.
With a several-voiced whistle and a resounding smack, the knotted rawhide thongs bit into Zaranda’s bare flesh. Clenched teeth barred a scream, but a groan escaped her throat. Her body twisted clockwise from the force of the blow, then turned widdershins, toes dangling two inches from a drain set in the slimy stone floor. Her whole weight depended from her arms, chained to a hook in the low, round-vaulted ceiling. Manacles bit her wrists like the pincers of a giant scorpion; her shoulders burned from unnatural strain.
When she could trust herself to speak more or less steadily, she moistened her lips and said, “I hate to disappoint you, but I don’t really have any vital secrets to withhold from you. So there’s not … much point … to this exercise.”
Shaveli Sword-Master laughed hoarsely. He swung his cat-o’-nine-tails so its thongs sang savagely. Zaranda shut her eyes and clamped her jaw, then winced as the lash struck stone flagging with a crack.
“Clearly you don’t understand, Countess,” he said cheerfully. The glare from a brazier, in which various iron implements nestled yellow-glowing heads among the coals, cast entirely redundant, fiendish highlights over his face. The dungeon stank of mold and hot metal and all the scents of fear. “You know nothing that could possibly be of the slightest use to my master—only how to inconvenience him, which I fancy you’ll not be doing any more. As to—”
Not looking at him, Zaranda had begun to move her lips soundlessly. Shaveli’s rat face twisted in rage, and he lashed her so cruelly that she could not help crying out.
He laid the whip’s handle to her cheek and forced her face toward his. “Casting spells, were we, witch?”
“I was merely … sending a prayer to Lliira,” Zaranda said. “I don’t feel as if my life has enough … joy … in it right now.”
The Sword-Master put his head back and laughed. Then he struck again. “Very clever. Very clever, indeed. I can tell we’re going to have a most diverting relationship.”
He tapped the handle against her cheek. A trickle of blood ran from the corner of her mouth where she had bitten her lip. “You should know, though, that none of your magic will help you now. Into the very mortar of these dungeon walls was worked powdered fragments of the bones of the
gods who exploded in the magic-dead realm of far Tantras. No dweomer can penetrate here, so chant away at your futile spells—it pleases me to punish you for doing so.”
That would account for the dull but constant throb between Zaranda’s temples; she had heard of such an effect from others who had passed through the rare dead-magic reaches of Toril. Magic was woven into the very fabric of the world, in all the creatures who walked upon it, swam its seas, flew above it or delved the Underdark below. To be cut off from sorcery, from dweomer, was an unnatural condition. Those steeped in the arts magical were so sensitive to such isolation that it caused them pain.
And here I thought it was that cursed brandy, she thought.
“No, it’s not information I seek,” he said, pushing her to set her rotating in her chains, sending pain flashes down from torn wrists to tortured shoulders. “It’s merely that whiling away the hours with you is the reward my stalwart service has won me from my just and generous master.”
“It’s true what they say in the markets, then,” Zaranda said. “That the only pleasure Shaveli can take from a woman is what he can get with whips and chains.”
Still spinning, she caught a glimpse of his features, a fiendish mask of fury. Her world became pain and screams.
The stone cell floor was cold and slimy beneath her as she lay in uttermost dark. At least it had the effect of soothing her welts. Best not mention that, or they’ll come scatter salt.
She could see nothing. On first waking in the dungeon, she had felt her way all around her cell. It had not been a lengthy process. The room appeared to be about ten feet in every dimension; by holding arms outstretched above her head and leaping as high as she could, she could just brush the ceiling with her fingertips. There was a heavy, metal-shod wooden door, a good hand thick to judge by the sound when she rapped it with her knuckles, with an armored judas gate set into it, currently shut. A drain was sunk in the center of the chamber, about half again as big as her palm and covered with a metal grate.
