by Victor Milán
Though the traditional dungeon dampness had engendered a coating of slime on the stones, they were well cut and fitted, so that she could barely feel the seams when she ran hands across them. Their smoothness was the smoothness of careful dressing by stonemasons with a Tethyrian concern for craft, not of generations of prisoners’ hands running over them in the vain hope that a portal to freedom would suddenly open up. Moreover the place smelled, well, clean. For a dungeon.
So she was captive in Zazesspur’s new Palace of Governance.
She tasted agony raw. Shaveli had a fine hand with a whip; she had to grant him that. Though her body felt as if it were wrapped in nets of live fire, as far as she could ascertain, he had not broken the skin once.
Which had certain implications, not necessarily soothing. It was just possible that Hardisty was dim enough to imagine she might be broken to his will through physical abuse. The problem was, he had known her as a war leader with no scruples about using ruses to win the day. He must know he could trust no compact she gave under duress.
And if he didn’t realize it, surely Armenides would. There was more to the self-proclaimed archpriest of Ao than his apple-cheeked smile and halo of hair suggested. During their interview a year ago, he stayed in the background uttering homilies, but all the same Zaranda could practically see the strings running from his hands to Hardisty.
She took it as an ominous sign that, as far as she knew, the baron had not paid her a visit. That implied a reluctance to look an old comrade-in-arms in the eye.
So the odds were good that she was being kept relatively intact for public execution—with first, perhaps, a public show trial.
She shifted, rolled over, cradled her cheek on her other hand. A bale of hay had thoughtfully been tossed in the cell with her to serve as a bed—it wouldn’t do to have her body a mass of sores when she mounted the gibbet. The prickly straw was small use at present. She would have been uncomfortable on the finest feather bed in Waterdeep, but she could at least redistribute aches.
She remembered … what? The taste of Tintoram’s Select—was there an odd dissonance, like the forty-fifth cherub from the left in the eighteenth row striking a sour note in the midst of an angelic chorus? She wasn’t familiar enough with exotic liqueurs to tell. It had to be the brandy, though—she would have tasted something amiss in the candied orange.
After that, remembered impressions: the thump, as of an ancient tome slipping from its shelf far off in a vast, dusty, drafty castle, which was her face striking the tabletop. The door opening, a voice distorted to unrecognizability saying, gruffly, “Take her.” Men dressed as artisans, plain everyday Tethyrian tradesmen whom none would suspect, rolling her up in a rug and bundling her onto their shoulders. They would have left openly but discreetly by a back exit—it was far from unusual for Faerûn hostelries to desire to have a carpet cleaned or replaced at odd hours of the night, and with as little fanfare as possible.
And after that—jostling, horse smell, harness jingle. Then nothing until she woke here in the dark, with only furtive, fugitive scurrying sounds and the dripping of water to remind her she yet lived.
She rolled onto her back—no, that was a mistake—onto her belly, laid cheek against chill stone. Who betrayed me? The thought was like mice gnawing her belly from the inside.
The Ithmong town council—no. Ithmongs were known for being unsubtle by Tethyrian standards, but she found it hard to believe any Tethyrian could be quite that blatant. And to what end? Ithmong didn’t distrust Zazesspur as sorely as it did Myratma, but would never happily see its rival rule all Tethyr. That was a major reason the town council was treating with Zaranda in the first place: Star Protectives offered a means of slowing or reversing the death by strangulation that was overtaking Tethyr without bending the knee to Zazesspur and the man who would be its lord.
As it was, suspicion would fall at once on Ithmong. Zaranda’s young cadre were bright, but villagers and countryfolk, not necessarily sophisticated. They might leap to the obvious conclusion and blame the town council. Farlorn would know better; Stillhawk had no more taste for intrigue than he had for wearing makeup, but he had been about in the world enough to realize how unlikely Ithmong was to be culpable. But would the man—the creature—who was her second-in-command?
Shield. The name tolled like a cracked bell in her brain. Someone had betrayed her when she was smuggling her caravan into Zazesspur. Someone had betrayed her inside Zazesspur. And someone had betrayed her in Ithmong.
Of course, what she had been betrayed for in Zazesspur was harboring the great orc. But what did that tell her, really? The searchers had missed him, after all. Maybe his presence had been used as pretext for searching Zaranda’s quarters precisely because it would divert suspicion from him. Such a convolution would almost certainly be beyond his means—but it was a typically Tethyrian, and Zazesspurian, bit of nastiness. And Shield was ever-so-good at carrying out plans that others drew up
He had plenty of other opportunities to harm you, she tried to tell herself. But it was meager solace: so did anyone else who would have been in position to betray her on those occasions. That meant only the orog, Farlorn, and Stillhawk. Chen had come into the game too late, Balmeric had left too early, and the several mercenaries who had accompanied her both into and out of Zazesspur were scattered across Tethyr teaching plow-boys and shepherd girls how to fight.
But why? Well, on other worlds evil was a choice, but here on Toril it was also a thing. Perhaps, as Farlorn and Stillhawk averred, it left an indelible mark on those who had been born to it.
And how? How could a servitor of evil pass himself as a paladin?
“Too easily, perhaps,” she answered herself in a bitter whisper, Who had ever heard of an orcish paladin? For that matter, who’d ever heard of a nonhuman paladin? Not Zaranda, nor anyone she’d ever spoken to about it. Perhaps Nyadnar had, but the sorceress would never have deigned to answer such a question, unless it served her highly idiosyncratic conception of the balance of forces necessary to sustain the universe—or her whim, which Zaranda suspected she found hard to tell from each other.
Still, still … Shield, can it be? She could not know for sure. All she truly knew was that someone she had accepted into her confidence had turned on her.
Which meant, ultimately, that the one who had betrayed her was herself.
She could no longer help herself. The weeping started as a bubbling forth from eyes and mouth, like water through the hull of a boat holed by a reef. Then it truly tore loose, gushing now, a torrent. Her body convulsed to strident macaw cries of grief and anger and fear and pain and humiliation, interspersed with hoarse, panting breaths as of one who has run until her heart is about to burst.
Finally, exhausted, she fell into a state that, by comparison to her previous condition, was sleep.
A scratching sound brought her instantly awake. Her fingers clutched for Crackletongue. Then she felt again the whip marks that clothed her, felt hard stone, smelled moist stone and foulness.
Again it came, the scrape of tiny claws on rock, hard nearby. Zaranda’s muscles tensed. There were any number of candidates for making such a sound, and under the circumstances it seemed unlikely to be anything pleasant.
Scritch, scritch. A slight hint of echo. Her visitor was in the drain, then. Well, that made it less likely it would be crawling over her face as soon as she fell back to sleep.
More scratching, of subtly different timbre, as if the unseen creature were testing the grate. Zaranda found herself oddly torn by hoping it would not somehow find a way through and at the same time hoping it would. Am I really so afraid of isolation, she wondered, that I’d prefer loathsome company to no company at all?
Silence now. She had an irrational sense that her hidden guest was waiting.
“What are you?” she whispered. Then she laughed; the stones from the dead-magic land would prevent eavesdropping by mystic means. She had encountered certain arrangements of tubes and funnels—miracles
of design, not dweomer-craft—that enabled someone in one part of a building to listen in on what transpired in a room in an entirely different part. It was possible Hardisty had such a system built into his palace. And what of it? She was talking to a rat or an insect or a doubtless loathly whatever; let whoever wanted to listen in. Much good might it do them.
“What are you?” she asked again aloud. No response, which was no surprise; only that curious sense of expectation.
“I guess it doesn’t matter, does it? You can’t answer me, and it isn’t very likely you understand, I’m merely talking to you because I’ll go mad if I don’t hear something besides my own breathing and the sound of water dripping; and if I talk to myself too much I’ll fear I’ve gone mad anyway.”
She had dragged herself over the floor until she lay with her cheek on the floor beside the grate. “You’re a patient one, aren’t you? What do you wait for?”
More silence, measured in many painful breaths. “Well, whatever you want, I guess I’ve not provided it yet. Please forgive my failings as hostess, but I wasn’t expecting to do much entertaining. I’m sure the place looks a fright.”
She turned her face toward the ceiling. The blackness hung above her with all the weight of the tons of stone overhead. “You know,” she said, “I’ve often heard that there is one who converses even with the rats and the roaches of Zazesspur. Certainly I’ve seen her in the company of beings stranger than that. If that’s true, tell her Zaranda Star is here.”
She rolled onto her belly, put her mouth close to the grate, and spoke in a fierce whisper. “She had some plan for me. I can’t carry it out if I rot down here, or if Baron Hardisty decides to have me discreetly strangled and dumped in the harbor. If you can hear me, bear word of me to Nyadnar.”
Nyadnar. Nyadnar. The name echoed down the sewer pipe. Through it Zaranda heard the skitter-scratch of tiny claws, dwindling. Nyadnar.
I am going mad, she decided. Doubtless, it’s for the best.
The clatter of massive bolts roused her. This wasn’t the latch on the food slot at the bottom of the door, through which bowls of water and gruel were thrust at what she was certain were calculatedly random intervals; the door itself was being opened. She gathered herself into a crouch. It wasn’t that she expected to be able to break past her jailers or overpower them. It was that, if they came to bear her to more torture, she would not suffer them to find her supine.
The door opened. The light from a single hand-held torch flooded through like noonday. Zaranda cringed and shielded her eyes like a vampire caught abroad by the rising sun.
In the torchlight stood silhouetted a tall figure in a robe and a square hat. “Zaranda Star?” it said. “Countess Morninggold?”
It was the voice of Duke Hembreon.
“You have held this captive in secret from the city council,” Duke Hembreon said. “This is illegal. You will surrender her to me forthwith, in the council’s name.”
Zaranda had clad herself in a white smock that one of the duke’s escorts had thrown at her. It was already much worse for wear, and she hadn’t taken a dozen steps in it. It took all her willpower to keep from simply letting herself hang in the grip of the two Zazesspurian city policemen who stood flanking her. She forced herself to stand upright, albeit swaying like a sapling in a squall, and listened to the white-haired duke and Shaveli debate her fate.
The Sword-Master tipped back his head and brayed laughter through his nose.
“It’s time to decide, old man,” he said in a challenging voice, hand on rapier hilt. The two blue-and-bronzes behind him wore unhappy looks beneath their morions.
“Decide what?” the duke demanded, visibly bristling at the other’s impertinence. His escorts, in the black-enameled boiled-leather helmets and cuirasses of the constabulary, glared at the civic guardsmen with frank hostility. The police had no love for these Johnny-come-lately paramilitaries.
“Whether you’re serious about the getting and keeping of power. Here’s an enemy to the state, an obstacle to your plans as well as ours. We had the situation under control. Why interfere?”
“The rule of law is paramount, and must be maintained.”
“Law?” The swordsman flicked dismissive fingers. “What is law? A means to an end. Law’s a fine tool; power’s better. But to use the power, one must have the will.”
“Power without law is corrupt, and soon turns to evil,” the duke said acerbically. “Sooner, rather than later, for the application of will.”
“Words,” Shaveli said. He gestured around the torch-lit corridor. “Around you is stone.” He slapped his rapier hilt. “And steel. Here are facts. Pit your words against them: which prevails?”
“The will of the council that your master has petitioned to make him master first of Zazesspur, and then of all Tethyr, will prevail,” the duke said. “For that is the law.”
Shaveli laughed again. “So now the law is to be your will?”
“It is given to the council to make the laws. Do you defy us? I think your lord will little thank you for your contumacy.”
The Sword-Master swept off his plumed hat and bowed low. “No contumacy, Your Grace; take your prisoner, and greatly may you enjoy the use of her.” The duke stiffened. “I crave only that you answer me a question philosophical: each day a dozen factions strive to pull you, your council, and my lord baron down. Will your laws suffice to stay them?”
“They must,” Duke Hembreon said stiffly, and nodded for his men to go.
The morning sunlight stung Zaranda’s cheeks like salt sea spray on an open cut, and made her eyes water. It was glorious all the same. She drank deeply of the breeze that molded the smock to her rangy form, and savored every nuance of it, the rotting fish and garbage and soot no less than the ocean smell and the spring-green grass without the walls. She even relished the freedom of a walk across the plaza, illusion though it was.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked, voice hoarse from screaming.
“To city hall,” the duke said. “You shall be decently housed and treated, though a prisoner you must remain.”
Passersby stopped to stare at the spectacle of a striking woman being led across the square in manacles, then hurried on their way. Zazesspurians were acquiring the reflexes needed to survive under tyranny, it appeared. “And why must I remain a captive?” she asked. “What laws have I broken?”
The duke’s blue eyes looked elsewhere than at her. “It is not for me to say. A bill of particulars shall be read to you when you face the judgment of the council.”
“So that’s the way of it.” Zaranda laughed. “And how did you come to learn I was Faneuil’s secret captive?”
“Information was confidentially lodged with the council to this effect.”
“Ah, so much goes on in Zazesspur these days that won’t stand the light of day.”
She shook her head. Her long dark hair, unbound, whipped in the wind like a cavalry pennon. “My erstwhile host the Sword-Master questioned your commitment to power. I have to wonder about your devotion to this rule of law you speak so much about. And I’ve a philosophical question of my own: if you lack the force of will to use and indeed abuse power, and at the same time, lack the will to adhere unswervingly to the law you pay lip service to—what then?”
But the duke had no more words to say to her, and so she passed into the ornate, archaic city hall, and back once again into servitude.
The great council hall of Zazesspur was a vast cathedral space, with a black and white parquetry floor, a pointed vault high overhead, and windows running clerestory beneath it down either side of the chamber. Beneath the windows, even above the two large doors of beaten bronze that gave onto the hall, ran rows of benches to seat such onlookers as the council saw fit to admit. Today they were thronged. Zaranda’s appearance before the city council—not her trial, as the crier made abundantly, indeed redundantly clear—was the social event of the season.
The council members had all brought claques selec
ted from among their retinues, which made for interesting and clashing blocks of color in the stands. Lords Faunce and Inselm Hhune, former councilors, were on hand, as were the syndics who ruled the guilds of Zazesspur, sweltering in fur-trimmed robes. Earl Ravenak and a noisy, aromatic contingent of Hairheads occupied a sort of island near the exit, none of their fellow spectators caring to get too close to them. On the other end of the hall and social scale, Armenides the Compassionate sat beaming benignly, surrounded by the white-robed scions of Zazesspur’s most pretentious families. Finally, a number of common citizens had been let in to watch the awful majesty of the nascent state vindicate itself. Evidently awed by the grandeur of occasion and surroundings, they were subdued by Zazesspurian standards, their jostling and chatter a low commotion, like a stiff breeze in the green-budding branches outside.
A long table occupied a low dais that ran from wall to wall at the head of the hall. Behind it sat the twelve members of the council: Deymos, Hafzul Gorbon, and Marquis Enzo; Anakul, serenely smiling in his robes of black and red and his black silken cowl fitted close to his round head and drawn to a peak between his brows; Malhalvadon Stringfellow, afidget in his chair like a barely continent child; Strombolio, in red and yellow; Jinjivar the Sorcerer—tall, gaunt, and splendid in a pale-blue and purple turban so extravagantly round as to make him resemble an attenuated mushroom; Torvid, Naumos, and Lady Korun; Baron Zam, looking sour; Duke Hembreon, looking even graver than usual, possibly preoccupied by the fact that his daughter Tatrina was nowhere to be seen in the placidly smiling All-Friends contingent. Their seating was controlled by a rigid and deliberately arcane rotation schedule.
At the table’s right end stood Baron Faneuil Hardisty. He was simply dressed in green, gold, and brown; his closest approach to ostentation was the silver chaplet he wore around prematurely graying temples, significant of his recent acclamation as lord of the city. Like the late kings of Tethyr, he had no right to sit at the council table, and his very presence was of questionable legality. It seemed to symbolize the radical-traditionalist thrust of his program: things will be as they once were, only different.
