The Magehound

by Elaine Cunningham

  “You need a few lessons,” she hissed. “Gwillon over on Low Street is looking for an apprentice. Give him this and mention my name.…”

  She had to think for a moment before the name of the child thief she’d once been came back to her. “Tell him that Sindra says you have promise.”

  The lad eyed the coin, then lifted an awed gaze to hers. That single skie might be more riches than he’d held in five moons, but the name was worth far more to him. Gwillon was a master pickpocket and a legend among the shadows of this city. The man was getting along in years, but his training might be enough to keep this lad alive. Justice in Halruaa was swift, and few thieves were caught twice. She’d given the boy a rare second chance, and he knew it.

  The boy fisted his hand around his apprentice fee and darted off in the direction of Low Street. Tzigone nodded approvingly and went on through the back way to the shop where she was currently employed.

  Chimes sang musically as she opened the door. Tzigone glanced up, marveling anew that something so beautiful could be made from the sort of scraps that a butcher might toss to stray dogs. Behir’s bones. Who would know by looking at the ugly creatures that they housed such fey beauty?

  Halruaans were never content to leave any creature as nature intended, and behirs were a special target of their breeding programs. Miniature behirs of various sizes were raised for purposes ranging from moat guardians to exotic pets, but like pigs and poets, they garnered most of their acclaim after their deaths. Their primary purpose was spell components.

  It seemed that nearly every part of a behir was good for something. The long, slender horns that flowed back from their heads were ground into powder and added to ink used in writing out spell scrolls for various lightning spells. Their talons and hearts went to making inks that were used to create spells offering protection from poison. Even the mundane uses of their leavings were marvelous. Their bones were crystalline and were used for scrimshaw. Like musical ghosts, the behir bones sang at the doors and windows of Halruaan homes long after the flesh that had clothed them was distant memory. The teeth, however, gave rise to the most creative uses. They were translucent and multicolored, often imitating and rivaling the hue and sparkle of gemstone.

  Tzigone crept silently to a large, oddly shaped wooden box that stood on a three-legged stand. It was a musical instrument, a special creation of Justin, the artificer who owned this shop. Inside the box were strings fashioned of behir’s gut and electrum wire, and on the wide end of the box was a row of neat ivory keys. When one of the keys was pressed, a curved fang was lifted by a complex series of levers until it plucked at the string. The sound varied greatly, depending upon what instrument the musician called to mind. These instruments were much in demand in the city, and Justin was building another, his back to Tzigone and his attention wholly absorbed by his work.

  She chose a sound and struck the key attached to the lowest, thickest string. The behir’s fang flashed up, and the electrum cord vibrated. A deep, full-throated sound reverberated through the room—not a musical instrument, but a wemic’s roar.

  Justin leaped and spun in one quick, startled movement. His glare melted into a reluctant smile as he met Tzigone’s grin.

  “A good jest,” he conceded. “But bear in mind, boy, that not everyone cares to be the brunt of your mischief. Keep it up and you’ll come to grief soon or late.”

  Tzigone had learned early in life that letting people think she was a boy was safer, if marginally so, than being seen as a young woman alone. “What can I do today?”

  “Behirs need feeding. There’s a clutch of new hatchlings to record, too. Three of them, and fine beasts all. Ethan’s brood, out of Blue Bess.”

  She followed him out into the back, where a series of long narrow pools housed the creatures. Sure enough, three new behirs, each not much bigger than a cat, lounged on the sunning rocks. All of them were covered with soft scales of the light topaz blue that Justin favored, and all had only six legs. Each would develop another three or four pairs before adulthood. They had yet to grow horns, and but for their length and color, they looked very much like sky-colored crocodiles.

  Justin watched Tzigone as she chopped fish and eels. She clicked her tongue, and the miniature monsters came to her like obedient hounds, swarming about the wall as she tossed them their food. The babies had to be nearly handfed, an exceedingly dangerous task for anyone whose fingers were less fleet than Tzigone’s. The hatchlings’ teeth, already gem-colored and sharp as needles, flashed and snapped as they ate.

  The artificer nodded approvingly. “You’ve a sure, quick hand with the beasts. I could use an apprentice, especially when it comes to the slaughtering. Gathering and treating spell components can be tricky work. Have you been tested for magic?”

  The question was rhetorical. Every child in Halruaa was first tested before the age of five, and often thereafter until his or her talents and destiny were decided. Tzigone had sidestepped the formal process and learned whatever skills suited her needs and caught her fancy.

  “I’ve less magic than a stone,” she lied in a rueful tone.

  “Ah.” Justine looked both disappointed and uncomfortable. It was not exactly a disgrace to lack magical talent in Halruaa, but except in the case of the jordaini, neither was it an honor. “Well, someone has to cook the soup,” he said in a conciliatory tone, falling back on a familiar proverb.

  Tzigone gritted her teeth and forced herself to smile and nod. She hated proverbs, and nothing annoyed her more than people who were so lazy or lacking in imagination that they allowed their words to travel only well-worn paths. Jordaini were often the worst. And here she was, indebted to a particularly arrogant member of the breed.

  So far today she’d been stung by a starsnake, chased by a wemic, and indebted to a jordain. And to cap matters, here she was, up to her elbows in fish guts.

  Tzigone shrugged. Chances were, tomorrow could be worse.

  When all the behirs had been fed, she went into the back room to record the new births. Her heart quickened as she dragged the heavy tome down from the shelf, and it beat like a wild elf’s battle drum as she paged through the complex birth records.

  Genealogy was vitally important in Halruaa. Records were assiduously kept in books filled with intricate lines and patterns. Tzigone was determined to learn the meaning of those markings. It was for this purpose that she risked her fingers to Justin’s behirs. Behir-tending was a job that few people would take, and he had gladly trained her in what little she needed to know to keep his records. The rest she would teach herself.

  When the light from the single small window began to fail and her eyes swam with the effort of deciphering the tiny markings, Tzigone slipped out of the back room to her next lesson, one that was closely related to her study of behir heritage.

  Each village, each city neighborhood, had a resident matchmaker. They were minor mages of the diviner school, and with the help of the birth records listed in the Diviner’s Registry, they saw far enough into the future to decide who should marry whom.

  Since matchmakers started with a woman and found an appropriate male, Tzigone needed to change her appearance before she presented herself. Two colorful scarves, nearly dry when she’d tugged them off someone’s line, would serve in her transformation. One tied around her waist would make a skirt, and the other she’d drape over her linen shirt. But first she stopped at a public fountain and scrubbed her face and arms clean. A bit of dirt lent her a more urchinlike appearance, but that wasn’t suitable to her desired image as a winsome, marriageable girl.

  Both the theft and the deceit lay easily on Tzigone’s conscience. She had lived on the streets for as long as she could remember, and she had learned early to survive. But more basic than that was the gypsy code that such a life had inscribed upon her mind and spirit. She had no real sense of property, at least not as most Halruaans seemed to regard it. Ownership was not a sacred right but a temporary thing. A coin was quickly traded for something she des
ired more, such as a hot meal or a pair of boots, nicely broken in and not too badly patched. She was as quick to give as she was to take, and that was the way of many who lived as she did. The scarves she draped over her slender form today would probably form an awning tomorrow to keep the sun from a sleeping baby’s face, or perhaps reawaken, if but for a moment, the vanity of some aged coquette. In Tzigone’s eyes, it worked out well enough. Nothing made of wood or cloth or metal was important enough to warrant the fuss people made over it.

  She’d just finished dressing when a spray of water arched toward her. Although she jumped back, the water drenched her borrowed finery so that the thin cloth clung to her legs.

  She looked up into a familiar dark face enlivened by a long, waxed black mustache and a teasing leer. Gio was a traveling entertainer, and as near to family as any she could remember during her waking hours. Laughter crinkled the man’s eyes, lingering there in pleasant lines and whorls. Though well into middle life, he was still a child who delighted in play and whose antics brought laughter and evoked childhood memories from those who had forgotten such things. There was a kind of magic in that, and Tzigone had enjoyed her years of travel with Gio and his partner.

  She laughed and splashed him back. “Still in town, Gio? I thought you and Viente planned to move on to Sulazir.”

  He laid a hand over his heart, pantomiming great insult. “Planned? Since when does Troupe Gioviente plan? Are we merchants or greengrocers, to trudge through our days in so dreary a fashion?”

  “I will not insult you by offering apology. For such words, I should slice out my tongue and throw it to the ravens!” she said, placing the back of her hand against her forehead and mimicking his extravagant delivery.

  The entertainer saw nothing amiss in this gentle mockery. “Sulazir has lasted this long without Gioviente. The city will survive a few days more.”

  Tzigone rephrased her question in a manner more likely to elicit information. “What kept you in town?”

  Gio cast his eyes skyward and shook a fist at some unseen power. “Carmelo is what, and I curse the day I took on that boy. Always getting fancy, he is, and getting us all dragged in for inquisition. We’re clean, as you know, but one of us had to spend some time in the hold for creating disturbance. It was his turn.”

  Tzigone smirked. Gio didn’t mind visiting his friends in the hold and doing a few tricks for the bored guards, but when it came to paying off a public debt, it was always someone else’s turn. She’d spent time in various dank, barred rooms herself.

  The diversions offered by the entertainers were not actually illegal, but someone was always challenging their claim that their tricks and illusions and feats of skill were simply that, unbolstered by aid of magic. Magic was common currency in Halruaa, and although Tzigone wouldn’t exactly say that her countrymen had lost their sense of wonder, they seemed both impressed by and skeptical of anything that was accomplished without magic. Fraud had to be proved, and once an accusation was made, the entire troupe would be hauled away for inquisition by the local magehound. Tzigone, of course, had always appeared to be utterly magic dead, a fact that did nothing to increase her confidence in wizards.

  Wizards had dogged her footsteps for years, laying traps and ambushes. Nothing they had produced against her so far had prevailed. She’d had a bad moment when she’d come close to nicking the wemic’s earring, a deep sense that touching the gem would be a grave mistake. Fortunately she was as sensitive to magic as she was immune from its effects.

  “So how is Carmelo?” she asked quickly, eager to think about more pleasant things.

  “Tolerable, all things considered. Tomorrow is his last day in the hold, and it will pass quickly. They just threw a jordain in the cell across from him, and you know Carmelo. He’ll tease every story and song out of the man before day’s end.”

  Tzigone’s ears pricked up. “A jordain? What did he look like?”

  The gypsy shrugged and spat. “Much the same as any I’ve seen, though better-looking than most. Dark hair, white clothes, both of which looked a bit worse for wear. Looks as if he’d made the militia earn their wages before they brought him in.”

  “That I doubt,” she said with certainty. Matteo had looked considerably scuffed up when they’d parted ways, and he probably was in much the same condition now. “If we’re thinking about the same man, this one would walk to the hold and lock himself in if someone so much as suggested that he bent a law.”

  “If he’s such a paladin as all that, why is he in the hold?” Gio asked, reasonably enough.

  As to that, Tzigone had a fairly good idea. It seemed she would have a chance to erase the debt the same day it was incurred. She thought fast “If I wanted to get into the hold, how would I do it?”

  “Getting in is never a problem. It’s the getting out that tasks me,” the man pointed out. “What’s this jordain to you, girl, that you’d waste your breath on such crazy words?”

  “I owe him a debt,” she said simply.

  The gypsy nodded. Property was something that neither would ever understand, but they knew the worth of things that mattered. “Well, then, I’ve just the thing for you. You remember how to walk on stilts?”

  She sniffed. “If you’re out to insult me, just call me an ugly bastard and get it over with.”

  “Biggest weapon first,” he said approvingly. “Not the usual strategy, but it should be. Might cut down on time wasted fighting.”

  “You were saying something about stilts?” she prompted.

  Gio’s eyes glittered with mischief. “Now, if you were the law and saw a pair of stilts lying inside the wall of the hold, what would you think? Someone’s trying to breach, that’s what. But a single pole? No one would think much of it.”

  “I don’t think much of it myself,” she retorted. She could vault a wall using Gio’s pole, and said so.

  “Ah, but not one like this,” Gio said slyly. He shouldered off his pack and took from it a bundle of oddly shaped sticks. “They fit together into one long piece,” he explained, demonstrating with several of them.

  “What are those notches for?”

  “Footholds. You can balance the pole and climb it at the same time. But mind you, stay well away from the walls. Lightning sheets cover the inside walls almost to the top. If you lose your balance and lean against the wall, you’ll be sizzling like bacon.”

  “Stay away from the walls? So how do I get out?”

  “Moss hangs from the cherrynut tree just outside the south wall. It is strong, and hard to see in the failing light. You’ll be in the tree before any of those lazy guards notice what you’re about.”

  Tzigone studied the placement of the notches and decided that the balance might work. To limber up, she bent backward until her palms rested on the ground, just behind her feet. Slowly she shifted her weight onto her hands and brought her legs up straight, then slowly lowered them down into another tight arc. She rose, standing in nearly the same spot as she’d been before the exercise.

  Gio nodded approvingly and handed her a length of pole. She braced it and hopped up, placing her feet on the lowest notches. She swayed for a moment until she found her balance. Then she found that she could indeed climb. She went up about six feet and then let the pole tip, keeping her grip on it as she lightly dropped to the ground. Even if someone noticed her performing this stunt, she would be up and in the tree before they realized what she’d had in mind.

  “This will help,” she said with gratitude.

  “It’s not an easy trick, but you make it look as if it were,” the gypsy said admiringly. “Like climbing a rope, or so it looks. If you were still with the show, you’d have us dragged in for magical inquiry sure as sunrise.”

  A thought crossed her mind and brought a wry scowl to her face. “Now that you mention it, the climbing will be the easy part,” she grumbled.

  Gio looked mildly offended, as if she’d insulted his latest toy. “You know a better trick, girl?”

  “Con
vincing a jordain to break out of the hold.”

  The gypsy considered this and then placed a hand on her shoulder in silent commiseration. “One more word from an old friend?”

  “Don’t bother telling me he’s not worth the trouble. I never met a jordain who was.”

  “I wouldn’t think of trying to sway you, seeing that your mind’s set on getting him out,” Gio protested. “Just do me this favor: If you’re caught, at least try to throw the pole out over the wall. I’d hate to lose it.”

  “Pride of ownership, Gio?” she teased him.

  He looked puzzled. “Just pure common sense. There’s not a man or woman inside the hold that would make good use of the thing. It’d be a shame to see it go for firewood.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The sun hung low over the mountains when Mbatu returned to the travel house he shared with Kiva. The wemic had a peasant man slung over his shoulders, much as a hunter might carry a deer. He shifted the man casually and tossed him at the magehound’s feet. The captive groaned from the jolt of impact and then curved into a tight, pained ball.

  Kiva didn’t see any marks on the peasant, but she didn’t expect to. Mbatu was too skilled and shrewd to mark his prey unless it pleased him to do so.

  The elf woman regarded their captive thoughtfully. He was a young man, about the same height as Matteo. His muscles had been honed by hard labor and his skin browned by the sun. There the similarity between the two men ended. The farmer’s face was twisted in pain but would not be considered particularly handsome in the best of circumstances. His hands were square and blunt-fingered, the nails ragged and grimed with soil. His hair was a similar shade of deep chestnut, but it was coarser than the jordain’s and not quite as long and lustrous. Darkness, however, would blur these small details. Magic and simple mundane extortion would cover the rest.

  “Will he be missed?” she demanded.

  The wemic shrugged. “Not particularly. He is a day laborer on another man’s fields. Such men come and go with the crops.”