by Cory Herndon
“A few hours,” Teysa said. “Even with this leg, it can’t take more than that to walk the length and breadth of my ‘empire.’”
As soon as she’d closed the door behind her, the headache began to fade. By the time she stepped out the front door and into the noonday sun, it had disappeared entirely.
* * * * *
“Watch where you’re going!” Pivlic shouted over Kos’s shoulder. “Are you mad?”
“I’m a little angry!” Kos shouted back. “But ‘insane’ mad? No. Just trying to get us through this mess.”
The dromad whinnied and jerked to one side, narrowly dodging the blade at the end of the ogre’s halberd. It crashed into reddish, polished, ancient stone and left a radial crack like broken glass.
“How are the thrulls?” Kos asked.
He felt Pivlic twist around in his seat, checking on the Grugg brothers’ progress. “Just like you told them,” Pivlic replied over the roaring ogre. “They’re not attacking. Look.” The imp pointed over Kos’s left shoulder, and sure enough the old ’jek saw the two faithful thrulls bounding along the rocky folds of a pressure fissure, keeping pace easily with the panicked, galloping dromad and staying well clear of the mine guards.
Kos should have kept his eyes on the path ahead. The second ogre had moved around to flank them on the other side and swung his halberd at the level of the dromad’s knees.
“Hey!” Kos shouted and pulled up on the reins, giving the dromad another kick. The beast’s hooves cleared the blade by a hand’s breadth but escaped unscathed. This ogre was quicker than the other, however, and simply dropped the halberd when his strike missed and brought up a fist that slammed into Kos’s protective sphere helmet like a hunk of stone. The sphere did not shatter, which was extremely lucky—it surely would have blinded Kos, if not killed him—but a web of cracks formed dead center, completely obscuring Kos’s view.
Kos swore, swinging his head left and right in a vain effort to see where he was going with his peripheral vision. “Pivlic, I can’t see anything! Where are we headed?”
There was no answer.
“Pivlic?” Kos repeated and reached back to see if the imp was still there.
He wasn’t.
Kos swore. Less than an hour into their rescue mission and already they needed rescuing themselves. From prospectors, of all people.
Blind, he couldn’t even be sure he’d be heading in the right direction if he went back. If he took off the helmet, the exposure to the kuga plague could kill him. Not immediately—Kos had a healthy dose of antigen pollen in his system like anyone else in the township—but he’d surely begin to contract symptoms within a day.
“All right,” Kos said aloud, “then we just get back before the day is done.”
He wound the reins around the pommel of the saddle and gripped the dromad with both legs. Then Kos reached up, placed both gloved palms against the cracked crystal sphere, and twisted it with all his might. The helmet turned left a half spin and clicked. There was a hiss of air as the seal on the suit was broken, and he pulled it straight up.
The hazy air, thick with plague and dust, stung his eyes, and the glare of the sun bouncing off the flats blinded him the rest of the way, but he managed to squint through it.
He’d cleared the mining claim completely. There was an open flat before him, and he could make out the branching path that led to the Husk. He was home free.
“Heeeeelp!” a tiny voice shouted distantly behind him. “Help! Get back here right now or you’re fired!”
Kos pulled back hard on the reins, harder still, and eventually convinced the spooked mount to stop and wheel around.
The first ogre had moved faster than Kos thought possible and held Pivlic suspended in the air by the helmet, which it clutched in a meaty palm.
“You forget something, raider scu—” the ogre said. Then it froze and blinked in disbelief. “Kos?”
“Garulsz?” Kos said. “What are you doing here?”
* * * * *
“What brings you here, Baroness?” Dr. Nebun asked. “I would think you would know better than to show up uninvited at a Combine laboratory.”
“And I would think that you—ow—that you would know better than to leave an Orzhov baroness hanging upside down any longer than you have to!”
“What? Oh, yes, yes,” the vedalken said. “My apologies. Uvulung, release her. Gently, please.”
“Yeth, Mathtuh,” the frog aberration said from its perch over the Simic’s doorway. She’d meant to go directly to the doctor’s laboratory, but it turned out his home was attached to the place—part of it, really—and so she’d knocked on the door. When that didn’t work, she’d pulled what she thought was a bell rope, and the next thing she knew her ankles were bound together and she was hanging—indignant, red-faced, and upside-down—before the entry way.
The frog aberration relaxed its vile tongue and she slid down into the vedalken’s hands. He helped spin her around and get back to her feet without much effort. He was stronger than he looked.
But strong or not, he was now the focus of all her embarrassed anger. “I sent word I was coming,” Teysa snapped. “There had better be a good reason for that.”
“There is,” the doctor said. “It keeps people from walking in unannounced.”
Teysa didn’t respond but looked up at the frog aberration, clinging to the doorway. With speed she could see the doctor found surprising, she whipped her cane upward and drove one end into the aberration’s open mouth, twirled the end so that the creature’s tongue wrapped around it, and pulled down hard. She whipped Uvulung against the stone street with a heavy, crunching thud.
The Orzhov baroness gave the cane a twist and released the aberration’s tongue, then pushed it over with her foot. Its bulbous eyes blinked, and its whip-tongue hung in a limp coil beside its head, but the creature was alive. Dazed but alive. That was good. Teysa hadn’t intended to kill it. “Aberration,” she said. “Uvulung. Do you see me?”
“Yeth.”
“I am the Baroness Teysa Karlov. I am announcing my presence. I will not announce it again, so consider me permanently announced. Then what just happened won’t happen to you anymore. Do you understand?”
“Yeth! Mathtuh, a Baroneth Teytha Karlof to thee you.”
“Would you like to step inside, Baroness?” the doctor said without skipping a beat.
“If you don’t mind,” Teysa said.
Dr. Nebun guided her past huge specimen jars filled with things that looked like amalgamations of amalgamations—distorted, redesigned, pulled-apart-and-put-back-together creatures that, she sensed, were somehow still alive. Tubes and beakers bubbled with rank-smelling things that lingered in the air. From there, he led her to an adjoining chamber that bore an uncomfortable resemblance to a medical examination room one might have found in the city. The primary difference was an incongruous fireplace in one corner and a wall filled with thick tomes bearing titles like Diseases of the Golgari Tombs and Cursed Reagents. She was not surprised when he took the chair and gestured she should take the long couch.
“I’ll stand, if that’s all right,” Teysa said. “I tend to pace. Lawmage, you know.”
“Suit yourself,” Dr. Nebun said. “Do you mind if I take notes?”
“I’d be shocked if you didn’t, Doctor,” Teysa said. “You seem to have assumed I’m here for treatment. Why have you taken us here?”
“You were alone,” the doctor said, “and your message did not mention what we discussed yesterday.”
“True,” Teysa said and strolled around the doctor’s chair, dragging her cane a bit as she went. “Yes, I am here for treatment. And if anything we discuss here becomes public, it will be the death of you, I promise.”
“Before I continue, may I assume you will pay my regular hourly rate for this consultation?” Dr. Nebun asked without batting an eyelash. Vedalken didn’t have eyelashes.
“Yes.”
“I take your word as your verbal contr
act and hereby assure you of complete confidentiality.”
“Good,” Teysa said. “Does it surprise you that I walk with a cane, Doctor? What does that tell you?”
“It tells me you are a true Orzhov, as does, quite obviously, your title,” the doctor said.
“Very good,” Teysa said. “You know the Orzhov blood comes with certain … perks. Abilities that others do not possess. But with a price.”
“Of course,” the vedalken replied. “The more powerful the abilities, generally, the more debilitating the so-called ‘conditions’ that come with them, yes?”
“Yes. And so it would not surprise you to learn further, then, that my leg is but one of the conditions I am afflicted with.” Teysa came around the chair and kept pacing, dragging the cane, until she stood facing him again.
“You do seem capable, and savvy. You obviously have power, though I have not seen it physically manifested in any way yet,” the doctor said.
“Interesting you should say that,” the baroness replied, “and irrelevant. You’re jumping ahead. No, I’m merely here for treatment of the condition you have not seen. I am afflicted with fainting spells. A form of narcolepsy, the family physicians called it. I simply drop into unconsciousness.”
“How frequently?” Dr. Nebun asked.
“It comes and it goes,” Teysa said. “Usually, episodes come in groups, maybe a few days, sometimes a few hours apart. Then they might not reappear for months, sometimes years.”
“So you’ve had these all your life,” the vedalken said.
“No, but Orzhov conditions do not arrive on a schedule,” Teysa said. “And to make a long story short, the supplies of medicine I brought to keep it under control were lost when my lokopede was attacked by the Gruul.”
“Do you think I am a simple pharmacist?” the doctor said indignantly. “I have created viruses that destroyed thousands! I—” the vedalken’s mouth clamped shut. “Oh, dear, you’ve done it to me again, haven’t you?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Teysa said but rapped the silver handle of her cane against the armrest of the doctor’s chair to punctuate the verity circle she’d just created in her turn around the room. “I do believe you when you say you have created viruses. I believe you are being truthful, and let’s leave it at that. No, Doctor, I do not think you a pharmacist or any other kind of simple medicinal peddler. But I do think you have a whole lot of things out there the likes of which I’ve never seen, in jars, and tubes, and tanks, and who knows what else. Now tell me, do you have something that will stave off any such attacks?”
“Well, I—That is,” the vedalken fought the power of Teysa’s hastily cane-drawn verity circle and lost, as he must. “Yes.”
“Nice to know,” she said. “You will take fair market prices for the lot? And either concoct or request from your Combine fellows a regular supply for all the time I am in this township as your baroness?”
“Who sets these fair market prices?” the doctor demanded.
“The market, doctor, which as you probably know is something we Orzhov are familiar with,” Teysa explained, as if to a child. “But,” she added as she stepped inside her own circle, “they will be fair.”
“Fair enough,” the vedalken said. Teysa nodded and stepped back out to resume her cane-assisted pacing.
“Now for my next question, Doctor,” she said. “Let’s call it a follow-up from yesterday. I asked if you could develop a cure for this kuga plague. You said you thought you could. After consideration of the length of time you’ve been here and the things I’ve seen in just a small portion of your laboratory, it occurs to me I may have been asking the wrong question.”
“But those are just for show!” the doctor said and made a move to get out of his seat. Teysa pressed the end of the cane against the center of the vedalken’s chest, pinning him to the chair with ease. “The—the real laboratory you haven’t seen yet,” he finished, with an odd tone of embarrassment and shame.
“I thought as much,” she said, then closed in for the kill—the reason she’d truly drawn that circle. “Dr. Nebun, do you already have a cure to the kuga plague?”
“I—I can’t—” the doctor struggled, then cursed. “Yes, I do. I have enough to cure every man, woman, and child of every sentient race in this valley.”
“Where?” Teysa said.
The vedalken set down his notebook and pulled aside his robe to reveal some twenty small glass tubes hanging in leather pouches. “Right here. Each one of these could cure several hundred people before running out. But only if you do it all within a few hours.”
“Wonderful,” Teysa said. “I’ll take them all. How does a million zinos sound?”
A successful bartender never forgets a face, a name, or a drink. Know each one of these and you will have their patronage for life.
—“Muck” Mukoz, Founder, Publicans’ Union,
The Care and Feeding of Patrons, Third Edition
2 CIZARM 10012 Z.C.
The ogress—the only way to tell it had been an ogress was her voice, as the bulky prospecting suit she wore erased any traces of gender that her ogre heritage didn’t—placed Pivlic down gently on his feet, and the imp wobbled a bit. Kos calmed the dromad while the ogress signaled her fellow prospectors to stand down. She turned the imp to get a good look at his face through the helmet. The ogre herself wore a much larger helmet, tinted slightly, and she had to squint, but finally she exclaimed, “This is that imp!”
“Yes,” Pivlic said, “Pivlic the imp, owner and proprietor of the Imp Wing Hotel and Bar, member in good standing of the Orzhov Guild and servant of the Karlov family.” The imp made the self-introduction sound like a threat. “And you are…?”
“Pivlic, this is Garulsz,” he said, slipping off the dromad without releasing the reins. “You two probably never met, now that I think about it.”
“The name sounds familiar,” Pivlic admitted, “but no, I can’t place the face. And I never forget a face. Especially not one like that.”
“Garulsz. Used to run the Backwater, back in city,” Garulsz said. “Pleased to meet you. Any friend of Kos, friend of Garulsz. Kos good man, good ’jek. Paid his tab before leaving town.”
“Ah,” Pivlic replied. “The Backwater. I seem to remember we were in a running competition for Kos’s liver. I’m afraid we both lost that one, my ogre friend. He’s switched to the dindin full time.”
“Let’s try to stay focused here, Pivlic,” Kos said gruffly. “Garulsz, we’re looking for a goblin. We’re on a job. We’re not prospecting. Though I do hope you’ve had some luck?” It felt good to say that. On a job. On a case, he’d almost said, but close enough. He’d spent too long at Pivlic’s, breaking up bar fights and getting drunks out the door. He belonged on a job. He half expected his heart to begin racing at the thought, but its beat stayed regular.
That brief fight was the most fun he’d had in years. So he couldn’t handle teardrops, so what? The trick to not using a ’drop was not getting injured. Kos, old man, you’ve been too cautious.
Either that, or the beginnings of kuga infection were making him delusional. Whatever it was, it was exhilarating, and his heart hadn’t acted up once.
“Some luck,” Garulsz said proudly. “Oh, who me kid? You Kos! You see right through Garulsz, you good ’jek! Yes, we doing quite well. You can see big digger, bigger than lot of others? We hit a vein. Some kind of—” Suddenly the ogress looked at Pivlic suspiciously, then back at Kos. “You sure you vouch for imp?”
“Pivlic’s my boss, now, believe it or not,” Kos said. “I wouldn’t work for him if I couldn’t vouch for him.”
“Quite magnanimous,” Pivlic said dryly.
“And if he in any way tries to take advantage of anything you tell us, I’ll tell you where he keeps his lockboxes,” Kos said.
“You wouldn’t!” Pivlic gasped.
“And the combinations,” Kos added.
“We are going to talk,” Pivlic mutte
red under his breath.
“Heh. All right,” the ogress said. “We think we found old bank of some kind. It huge vein of treasure, and it what Garulsz and her cousin and her employees,” she waved a warty hand at the other ogre and the armed guards, “use to buy big mining rig to get out even more.”
“Sounds like you’re set for life,” Kos said, “with a little hard work. A bank?”
“If you’ve found a bank, ogress, you should notify the Orzhov,” Pivlic said. “No doubt there are records of its loss in the archives.”
“Pivlic, cut it out. I vouched—” something felt like it caught in his throat, and he began to cough. After a few seconds, it passed, but Kos felt a little dizzy. “Sorry,” he said, pointing at his bare, bald head. “No helmet.”
“Oh no!” Garulsz said. “This all Garulsz’s fault! Let me get you new one.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Kos said. “I doubt you have any that would fit,” he added, eyeing the pair of viashino and the other ogre, who was looking at both Kos and the imp skeptically despite Garulsz’s stand-down order. They obviously understood Ravi because they had been paying special attention to Pivlic ever since he brought up the Orzhov archives. “Besides, I won’t be out here long. You could help me most by letting me know where the Utvar Gruul are setting up camp these days. I spotted them a few days ago, but then—the camp, well, it moved.” No need to add everything he’d seen—the captive, for example, or what looked like a raging argument between Trijiro the centaur and the raid captain Vor Golozar. He knew Golozar from the bandit’s few forays into the township. He didn’t strike Kos as an evil man, but he had certainly been confrontational during his one visit to the Imp Wing. Best not to mention that to Garulsz. The ogress had always been somewhat protective and would probably want to come along. If she did, he doubted they’d ever find the camp. Ogres had a way of standing out.
“Oh, sure,” Garulsz said. “We keep eye on them. They head north. You don’t want to take the usual path up into Husk.” She brought Kos into the crook of one arm jovially and pointed toward a spot in the Husk so far north it was hazed over with plague winds. “You’ll need to ride straight through, then. You see that little trail up the side?”
